Based on the popular videogame series, the movie Hitman focuses on Agent 47(Timothy Olyphant), a member of an elite society of assassins-for-hire. Luckily for those of us who saw the original trailers, we now know Agent 47 was trained by a separated branch of the Roman Catholic Church to combat evil, although the movie itself never makes this connection or seeks to give much backstory to 47's origins, aside from brief clips during the opening credits of him being trained from childhood how to fight, use weapons and of course, kill. But the scenes are very generic, and the training could have been done by anyone. Aside from mentioning that 47's agency "has ties to every government", there's never any explanation given as to how he's hired out, if he has an actual base of opera-tions, or who he reports to. There's a lot left out of the plot, but that's primarily because there really isn't one, except for the loose stitchings of scenes director Xavier Gens(a French director making his American debut here) and writer Skip Woods(Swordfish, the upcoming G.I. Joe) choose to string together so they can get from one action scene to the next.

     The story begins with the impending assassination of Russ-ian president Mikhail Belicoff(Ulrich Thomsen), which is to be carried out by Agent 47. The assassin is all set to make a quiet death for Belicoff, but at the last instant his contractor decides the hit must be made public as an example...to who, exactly? Belicoff isn't a radical dictator type nor is he a conser-vative party member; he's a moderate, which basically means he shouldn't be a threat to anyone. But Agent 47 isn't one to think things through really, unless it pertains to him being injured or killed...and so he carries out the assassination as ordered. But then he's told through his super-duper-secret contact laptop that there was a witness to the murder, some-one who saw him and is set to identify him to the Russian police and Interpol. This someone is a prostitute named Nika Boronina(Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko, making her American debut), who happens to be Belicoff's woman on the side.

     Naturally, although Agent 47 decides to make the hit, it turns out things are not as they seem. Soon enough, he and Nika are on the lam together, 47 choosing to have mercy on her and realizing she needs to be kept alive, as she might be the only person on Earth besides him who can bring to light the nefarious plot by the late Belicoff's underlings to replace him with a double. To make matters only moderately worse for Agent 47, he is being pursued by Interpol officer Mike Whittier(Dougray Scott) and his faithful sidekick Jenkins(Michael Offei). Whittier and Jenkins have been after Agent 47 for some time, Whittier believing in a very Mulderish fashion that he's responsible for dozens of murders around the world, which of course his boss scoffs at...yet still seems fit to fund his and Jenkins' little jaunts around the globe. "Hey, Jenkins... whattaya wanna bet our guy's going to be on a spree in Hawaii for about two weeks?" "Sounds good to me, dude!" Must be nice.

     Hitman isn't all bad, though...it has some well-choreograph-ed(though not hugely inspired) fight scenes and shootouts, which of course is the main reason anyone goes to a movie called Hitman. It also has a couple of scenes of Kurylenko in the buff, which will please the fanboys to no end. She's a very sexy woman who does her best to make due with the vapid and completely extraneous role she's been given. It's just a shame she has to pay her dues by appearing in a film as pointless as this.

     There are little subplots running around here and there about arms deals, drug runners and the wry interplay between Agent 47 and Nika, as she tries her best to sexualize 47 with her attempts to break through his wall of inner discipline so they can create The Beast With Two Backs. But the main problem with Hitman is that none of this means anything...none of it, not for two seconds. All the dialogue, all the machinations of Belicoff's double and his right hand man, secret police commandant Yuri Marklov(Robert Knepper), the fact that other agents from 47's order have been hired to hunt him down and execute him. None of it counts, none of it matters, because they're all just excuses set up to pretend there's an actual plot at work while Gens and Woods wait around to get to the next action set piece.

     Agent 47 as written isn't really an assassin...he's simply one step away from being a psychotic sociopath, ready to kill anyone just because they happen to get in his way or be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whittier is dogged in his obses-sion to catch 47, but maybe he hasn't done so yet because he's an idiot. Really...what cop lights up and smokes a cigar-ette in the middle of a crime scene? Or is potentially contamin-ating the evidence how Interpol rolls these days? Nika appar-ently chooses to go with whomever the badass of the moment is, or maybe she just gets off on being abused. Last time I checked, most women don't get turned on by being locked in a car trunk with a corpse, but Nika seems to deal with it rather easily when 47 does it; and though there's absolutely no reason whatsoever for her to fall for him, she's sure eager enough to climb on top of him in order to try and tame a bad boy.

     Hitman isn't a completely horrible film, and when compared to such recent abominations as Dragon Wars and The Seek-er, it almost seems Oscar worthy by comparison. There's a moment when 47 has to make a quick escape and bursts into the room of two kids playing the videogame Hitman...depend-ing on your tastes, this will elicit either a chuckle or a groan. Like the game, which was inspired by Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita and The Professional, the film itself has a moment directly ripped off from the latter, more superior movie. How-ever there was one scene which actually had me applauding, because it truly was one of those really cool moments that movies are expected to provide. The problem is that Hitman doesn't provide enough of them. It's a forgettable entry into the action/shoot-'em-up genre, and while it will more than likely do quite well in its initial bow, by the following week its memory will probably be seeping out of the collective film-going consciousness.