Hitman - Everyone dies alone

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Movie
German title Hitman - Everyone dies alone
Original title Hitman
Country of production France , USA
original language English
Publishing year 2007
length Unrated ( Extended Edition ): approx. 91 min / theatrical version: approx. 89 minutes
Age rating FSK 18
JMK 16
Rod
Director Xavier Gens
script Skip Woods
production Adrian Askarieh ,
Charles Gordon ,
Pierre-Ange Le Pogam
music Geoff Zanelli
camera Laurent Barès
cut Carlo Rizzo ,
Antoine Vareille
occupation

Timothy Olyphant plays Agent 47

Hitman - Everyone dies alone is the film adaptation based on the Hitman computer game series from 2007 .

action

Initially, the "creation" of the agents, their training, the tattooing of barcodes on the back of the head and the failed escape of two childhood agents from the laboratory - they are shot by a sniper. The action begins in the private home of Interpol investigator Mike Whittier, who comes home and is expected by Agent 47 in his study. With Whittier putting his gun in the kitchen, Agent 47 forces the defenseless Interpol investigator to sit down. Agent 47 also asks him how a good person decides when to kill someone else.

A three-month flashback follows in which Agent 47 carries out an assignment in a shanty town in Niger , where he uses a man wanted by a ruling warlord as bait. He lets this man swallow explosives beforehand and sews a bug into his throat, through which he overhears the warlord from a safe distance until he gets to the bottom of the ambush. While trying to escape, Agent 47 kills the warlord with the bait by detonating the bomb with a remote detonator. Shortly thereafter, Agent 47 is shown on his next assignment in St. Petersburg . He is informed that his client wants to give him new parameters and that he has to kill his target, the Russian President Mikhail Belicoff, in public. Agent 47 is successful in his job by killing a bodyguard standing in the line of fire before the actual murder and then killing Belicoff himself with a sniper rifle from a distance of four kilometers. Before he leaves Russia, Agent 47 learns that the witness Nika Boronina is said to have watched him do what he did and must also be eliminated. When he stands across from her on the street, he hesitates because she doesn't recognize him and has obviously never seen him before. The situation escalates when a civilian accidentally intercepts a bullet destined for Agent 47 and fired by an agent from the agency. Agent 47 goes into hiding in the crowd while the other agent is still trying to take him out.

Although Agent 47 is certain to have killed Belicoff, it is reported in the media that he survived the attack, injured only by a grazing shot .

Agent 47 confronts his contact person with the question of who wants Nika dead because she cannot be a witness, and why Belicoff is referred to as slightly wounded in the media. However, he does not receive any answers. At this very moment, special forces move in outside the hotel suite. Among them are Mike Whittier and his partner, who obtained the whereabouts of Agent 47 from an anonymous tipster. You meet the FSB , which is led by its chief investigator Yuri Marklov on this mission. Marklov sends a special task force to the hotel to arrest Agent 47. Meanwhile, the ominous contact person Diana calls the assassin on a phone and explains that Belicoff himself was the client for the assassination attempt and that his position was betrayed by the agency. Shortly afterwards, the task force attacks. During the subsequent escape of Agent 47, 16 commandos are killed, while Agent 47 escapes by jumping from the balcony into the Neva .

Agent 47 does not go into hiding, but decides to follow his only lead and kidnaps Nika, who soon after learns from him that her driver should kill her. During her interrogation, she tells him that he may have killed Belicoff's doppelganger . Agent 47 doesn't believe her, but lets her live anyway.

The two try to leave St. Petersburg by train, but are intercepted by four agents at the station. Agent 47 kills three of them in hand-to-hand combat and then shoots the fourth agent who, after interrogation, refused to say why he was being hunted. Shortly afterwards he meets Whittier and his partner. He shoots Whittier's partner in the arm, but spares his life. Whittier is also shot, but the bullet does not penetrate his protective vest , so only two ribs are broken. Nika, who followed him, begs Whittier's mercy, and Agent 47 renounces his execution.

After Nika and Agent 47 escape, he arranges a meeting with Agent Smith of the CIA , with whom he suggests a deal. Smith would help him in the future, that is his condition; in return, Agent 47 kills Belicoff's brother Udre, an arms and slave dealer . Smith accepts the condition and gives him the information necessary for the act. Agent 47 and Nika travel to Istanbul , where Agent 47 kills Udre.

Udre's death serves the purpose of luring Belicoff's doppelganger into the public eye. He and Yuri Marklov are part of a plot to put a puppet controlled by the FSB and other hardliners at the head of Russia . Agent 47 kidnaps Yuri Marklov and forces him to instruct his own FSB agent to kill Belicoff's doppelganger if he is delivering the eulogy for his brother Udre. Agent 47 disguises himself as a soldier and intercepts Belicoff's doppelganger on the run from the church and kills him. He then allows Whittier to arrest him and escort him through the ranks of the Russian military. While driving, Whittier's car is stopped by CIA agent Smith, allowing Agent 47 to escape.

The flashback is over, the scenery is back to Whittier's house. Agent 47 makes Whittier an offer. On the floor in Whittier's study lies the body of an Agent 47-looking agent of the Agency who was killed with Whittier's gun. Whittier is said to have passed the dead off to the police as Agent 47, so that the case will be filed. Whittier rejects his request, but Agent 47 tells him that this is the best solution for both of them and says goodbye with the wish never to see him again.

Then you see Nika picking up an envelope from the post office with an unknown sender. In the envelope are the papers for a winery , because she told Agent 47 about her childhood dream of owning her own winery. Agent 47 watches them up close through a sniper rifle scope. He looks at a corpse on the floor, says that they had better left Nika alone, turns around and leaves.

background

In 2003, Eidos and IO Interactive , the rights owners of the video game of the same name, began negotiations with various Hollywood studios. 20th Century Fox was finally able to secure the adaptation rights for the film. Writer Skip Woods was hired to write the script, with actor Vin Diesel in the lead role. But Diesel was already committed elsewhere, whereupon Timothy Olyphant was hired for the lead role and Xavier Gens as a director in January 2007 . However, Diesel is named as executive producer in the credits . Production began on 27 March 2007 in Sofia in Bulgaria and took 12 weeks to June 15, 2007. Other film locations include Cape Town in South Africa , Istanbul in Turkey , the British London and the Russian St. Petersburg .

The budget of the film was estimated 24 million US dollars . On the opening weekend in the USA, of the total of around 39.7 million US dollars, almost 13.2 million US dollars were raised. In Germany, almost 170,000 viewers saw the film in cinemas. Originally the US theatrical release was planned for October 2007, but was postponed to the end of November due to scenes to be re-shot. The film was shown in cinemas in the USA from November 21, 2007, and the German theatrical release took place on December 13, 2007.

Part of the opening sequence was taken from the opening credits of the American series Dark Angel by James Cameron . As in the game Hitman: Blood Money , Ellen's third song (Ave Maria) by Franz Schubert is used as the background music for the film opening credits .

The film is a film adaptation of the video game series of the same name , but the film differs in some places from its original. In the film, the agents are orphans, in the game, however, they are clones , which explains the barcodes on the back of their heads, among other things. In addition, the first two parts of the game are about clarifying the identity of Agent 47 and that he has to deal with his "creator". In the film, it is “monks” who accompany the children in their training at the beginning, which explains the church scene, among other things. In the game, the creation of agent 47 takes place in a secure and separate part of a psychiatric clinic . His skills are also not learned, but as a clone can be attributed to his disposition, so to speak. The agent's rigid posture while fighting in a hotel, for example, is also intentional and modeled on the computer game. The photos Nika gives Agent Smith are not shown to the viewer, but it is said that Agent Smith or the CIA would be embarrassed if Agent 47 were arrested with them. This is an allusion to the computer game in which the player has to free Agent Smith, here not as an older agent, but with a red hair and about the same age as Agent 47, from embarrassing situations several times. In the film, Agent 47 uses a gun in almost every situation, only when he captures chief investigator Marklov, not a single shot is fired. In the game, however, Agent 47 can do most of his jobs without a single shot. The special forces storming the hotel are modeled on the special forces of the game and a certain resemblance to the anime " Jin-Roh " can be recognized, in which the special forces wear similar combat gear. The riot gear that Agent 47 wears consists of several protectors from the Italian company Dainese , such as the elements on the shoulder and back. The part that Agent 47 wears as a kind of deep protection is actually a chest protector, also from Dainese.

When Agent 47 escapes into another room while storming his hotel room one floor below, two teenagers can be seen playing the console game Hitman in the room .

Since the film is fictional, not all of the details reflect reality. Agent 47 is said to have shot the Russian President in the head with a sniper rifle from over 4 km. The known hit of a sniper over the greatest distance is only 2,475 m with an AWM L115A3 . In addition, the Russian special forces that are present at Udre Belicoff's funeral wear steel helmets that are not of Russian origin. Rather, they are helmets of the National People's Army of the GDR . In the film, the vehicle with which Agent 47 is finally taken away has a Mercedes-Benz G-Class, W463 series, a star on the hood. This is a special construction because there is no series model with a star on the hood. In the film, Agent 47 and Nika cross the border between Russia and Turkey . However, this border does not exist because the two states are not neighboring states, but are separated by Georgia . The lettering on the west of the FSB employees shows a reversed “С”; correctly it says "ФСБ".

Mike Whittier can be seen several times in the film with a cigarette in his mouth, but it never burns or he never gets to light it.

The character of Yuri Marklov is based on Vladimir Putin , who also began his career in the secret service, especially the striking facial features of Robert Knepper , who was chosen for this role, are reminiscent of Vladimir Putin.

When Agent 47 captured Yuri Marklov and chained him in the bathtub, he said to him in the original English "... live or die - make your choice ...", which is a reference to the film Saw .

Most special forces use a Russian Kalashnikov , mostly a new version, the AK-105 .

reception

Overall, the response to the film was negative: The Rotten Tomatoes review database counted 14% positive reviews (out of a total of 101).

Oliver Noelle writes in TV-Digital that the film is a “fast-paced and supercooled high-gloss action”, although “better than most other film adaptations of video games, but not as strong as the model ' The Bourne Ultimatum '”.

The Cinema editorial team writes that the film is a “wild, confused baller orgy that begins with a conspiracy in Eastern Europe and ends as a conventional avenger story”. Leading actor “Olyphant doesn't really convince in the title role. His one-dimensional killer posing may be exactly modeled on the video games, but he looks too much like a fighting dog in Yul Brynner disguise. And the scenes in which he bares his teeth angrily turn out to be weird to him. ”You can also tell that the film was inspired by John Woo's work“ Face / Off - In the Body of the Enemy ”. In summary, the "endless and stereotypical baller orgy based on video games" is too boring in the long run.

Kai Schmidt of the video game magazine GamePro says, "Hitman - Everyone dies alone" is a "successful action thriller that is entertaining". He also praises the “convincing main actor, the refreshingly old-fashioned staging and the breathtaking action sequences”. Furthermore, Schmidt praises, despite the concessions to the mass market, the numerous allusions to the Hitman games and that the film, after the filming of " Silent Hill ", is the best implementation of a computer game so far.

Wolf von Dewitz from Hamburger Abendblatt sees parallels in the film with the film " Shooter " with Mark Wahlberg from 2007. He complains that the production was not flawless and at the same time praises the choice of locations, the implementation of the action scenes and the overall impression left by the film: “The filmmakers' knowledge of geography gives cause for concern when they let the hero couple cross a border between Russia and Turkey. But the images from the locations of Saint Petersburg and Istanbul develop their effect. Model athlete Olyphant always cuts a fine figure in a dark suit and with a bald head. The fight scenes are also a spectacle. "

The lexicon of the international film judges: “On the image and sound level, a flawless adaptation of a first-person shooter game, which enjoys celebrating surface stimuli and hardly wastes energy on developing a story. As a soulless attempt to create a new franchise, the film itself undermines the sense of the PC game and, above all, produces boredom. "

continuation

Xavier Gens was already speculating on a sequel while filming. He therefore deliberately refrained from finally clarifying the origin of Agent 47, but introduced characters to suggest that Agent 47 was a clone . When the 20th Century Fox studio decided to relieve Xavier Gens of his duties and shoot some scenes again, dialogues about the origins of Agent 47 were changed or added, making it impossible to make a sequel based on the style of the original lying video game series to tell.

In June 2009 it was announced that a second film was still being planned. The script was to be written by Kyle Ward , who was also responsible for the script for the film adaptation of the computer game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men . In June 2012 Adrian Askarieh was named as the producer of the follow-up film.

Originally, Paul Walker was slated to star in Agent 47 . After his sudden accidental death, the role was re-cast with Rupert Friend . At the beginning of February 2014, Zachary Quinto was also brought on board the project. Gens was replaced by Aleksander Bach , who made his feature film debut. The film was entitled Hitman: Agent 47 in US cinemas on August 21, 2015.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Age rating for Hitman - Everyone dies alone . Youth Media Commission .
  2. ^ Brian Linder: Games to Film: Hitman, IGN . 
  3. ↑ Dave McNary, Ben Fritz: Woods to adapt 'Hitman' , Variety . 
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g Background information according to the Internet Movie Database
  5. ^ Ali Wood: Filming starts on Eidos Movie , Instock. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007 Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.instockmagazine.co.uk 
  6. ↑ a b c d budget and box office results according to the Internet Movie Database
  7. ↑ Locations according to the Internet Movie Database
  8. ↑ Start dates according to the Internet Movie Database
  9. ↑ a b Wolf von Dewitz: Unimportant Action Tearer: "Hitman - Everyone dies alone" . Hamburger Abendblatt , December 13, 2007, accessed on April 22, 2017.
  10. ↑ Hitman - Everybody dies alone at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
  11. ↑ TV-Digital, Oliver Noelle, 25/2007
  12. ↑ Hitman - Everyone Dies Alone - film . Film review on Cinema Online , accessed April 22, 2017.
  13. ↑ GamePro , Kai Schmidt, 1/08, p. 103
  14. ^ Journal film-dienst and Catholic Film Commission for Germany (eds.), Horst Peter Koll and Hans Messias (ed.): Lexikon des Internationale Films - Filmjahr 2007 . Schüren Verlag, Marburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-89472-624-9 .
  15. ↑ Christopher Bock: Hitman: The movie has a successor . Games Aktuell , June 25, 2009, accessed April 22, 2017.
  16. ↑ Chris Tilly: Deus Ex Movie in the Works . IGN , July 10, 2012, accessed April 22, 2017.
  17. ↑ Hy Quan Quach: Hitman: Agent 47 - Zachary Quinto joins the cast of the Hitman sequel . Gamona, February 1, 2014, accessed April 22, 2017.