Review: Hitman

Anthropologists seeking to understand the nerd need look no further than this admirably half-assed exercise in stylistic masturbation. How half-assed is Hitman? At one point, the titular innominate is in a fancy hotel being pursued by, I don’t know, ninjas or something, and the set-dressing consists of bits of paper with numbers printed on them sellotaped to the doors so as to convey the notion of “hotel”.

The Hitman himself is ingeniously characterised in the same way the original Halo’s Master Chief was ingenious. His baldness, onastic dedication to tech, brooding sexlessness: all exist to posit the Hitman as a blank slate onto which every nerd can project himself. Timothy Olyphant’s bland staunch-white-guy nonperformance elevates him to mythic levels of identifiability: he becomes the Everynerd. What character he’s allowed to exert conforms perfectly to how nerds talk when trying to sound staunch or savvy: all clipped imperatives, minimal aggrandisements.

His sidekick, often-naked Kurylenko, is what every nerd wants women to be. Relentlessly derided and humiliated, she responds with progressively less-subtle sexual advances. (And her idea of a subtle sexual advance is, “remember, I’m not wearing any panties”). There is no woman in Hitman who is not at some point horribly mistreated, but Kurylenko’s character responds to the Hitman’s grating social dysfunction with unyielding, dripping admiration. The worse his Asberger’s-level social skills compel to treat her, the more she wants him! Wow, this must be how real women are, out there in the world!

But hey, if it gets the geeks renting some Bond movies for a realistic depiction of world politics and human social dynamics – it can’t be all bad, right?