Forty-one stoney gray steps to the box

Each Day, A Film:
February 6th 2012 (Retrospective)

Believe it or not, we're going to take a break from our standard Superhero season programming - yes, I know, only two entries in, bide your time - to talk about Pet Theories.

Now, I love Pet Theories - whether of the standard 'epilectic trees', or those that get 'jossed' - but I can't actually remember the last time I thought something along the lines of "oh, the spaceship represents man's internal psychological need for catharsis! It's so obvious!"

The choice of film, however, may come as a shock to you.



Yes, we're going to talk about Hitman, and yes, it's a video-game adaptation, and yes, it's not going to win any awards any particular time soon.

But, damn it, it's actually a much better film than I expected.

I have no idea how or why, but a few weeks ago I impulse-bought the film on DVD for a cheeky £0.01, plus postage, which increased the price by approximately 149%. No real reason other than it must have come up in conversation somewhere along the line and it was cheap and if you need any more justification than that, well, here's not the place or the time.

Now, I had actually seen the film before, but while travelling - so it was one of those odd limbic cuts that's neither theatrical edition nor completely bowlderised. The DVD, however is the - now wait while I go check - extreme edition, as in too extreme for cinema.

I don't normally have much truck with the DVD-only "extreme" or "unrated" versions, because the only things that tend to happen are more swearing or less cuts and trims to violence. Alternatively, in the case of the 'unrated' version of Enemy of the State, everyone says fuck every few minutes just to keep the ratings-o-meter ticking over. Seriously, if you haven't seen the unrated Enemy of the State, it's so much fun watching Seth Green swear, you'll have a ball.

But watching Hitman today, I ended up with a theory about the subtext of the film.

Don't get me wrong, the concept of Hitman having a subtext was initially pretty much anathema, but then I stopped being so snobbish, started watching the film, and realised that it's actually very well made. My measure of a well-made film tends to be whether there's any instance where I stop and rewind the film to see a particular instance of pretty - and yes, that's kind of shallow, but I like to liken it to a wannabe magician watching a superstar on stage to learn - but Hitman rewarded me within the first twenty minutes with one of the most beautiful scene transitions I've seen in a long time.

I can't find a specific image, so you'll have to bear with my somewhat ropey description, but;

- Cut to black screen
- Muzzle flash from pistol illuminates 47's face and upper body as he fires a pistol
- Light from the muzzle flash travels with the bullet to illuminate the caption: "Three Months Later"

It all takes place in roughly two seconds of real time, but it's hauntingly pretty, and, quite cleverly, never used again within the film.

Let's get back to the theory, though, because it means I get to use the word Avatars without it sounding like a 3-D sequel.

It's a theory - and it's just a theory, because everyone on the internet has at least two opinions and twice as many theories - but once you strip away the text and go right for the subtext, Hitman is about the avatars of Love and Death.

Of course, because it's such a shitty world they live in, Death is an assassin conditioned from birth to be the best killer possible, and Love is the ex-sex-slave of an abusive Russian politician.

So Death is assigned a target, and kills him; except that he doesn't, because the person he killed was either the real politician (who people with vested interests wanted dead) or a double. Even though whoever-it-is has their head ventilated with high-caliber weaponry, the crowd are persuaded to believe that it was just a scratch, and that he's fine, really.

So when a death goes wrong for Death, that's when his normal daily routine - wash, brush teeth, floss, breakfast, kill politician, catch train - starts to go just that extra bit wrong.

Enter Love, in the form of Olya Kurylenko as Nina, whose ex-boss/partner/torturer, the politician, is now in a state of Schrodingers' Death; her position is now what you might call 'difficult'.

After this, through a series of comical mishaps and hi-jinks, Death and Love end up going on a road trip together, and with time alone in each other's company, a quirky kind of sexual friction begins to emerge, because Death's more afraid of Love than Love is of Death. When Love works this out, it's basically non-stop flirting from thereon in.

Agent 47: [...] That suitcase perfectly holds my Blaser sniper rifle and two .45s and a gag for irritating, talkative girls like yourself. Do you want me to stop and get it out?

Nina: I don't know. Do we have time for foreplay?

You have to admire Nina for having no self-preservation instinct whatsoever other than to continually flirt with the person who kills, and kills, and kills, often right in front of her, as if flirting and seduction were a shield.

This leads to Death and Love sharing a hotel room, where Death's ice begins to crack because Love keeps walking around in nothing but her underwear - and frankly, wouldn't your ice begin to crack at that? - and then, later in the restaurant, there's no guarantee of that:

Nina: What colour underwear am I wearing?
47: You're not wearing any underwear.

Which is revisited a little while later - if memory serves - when Love tries to seduce Death and, briefly, the power dynamic that's been wobbling all over the place shifts towards Love.

Then, naturally, Death sedates Love and goes out and kills more people, because Death's not about the sexual shenanigans.

This is the thing, for me; Death is Love's saviour; he kidnaps her, yes, but after that he protects her in every way possible until he has to send her away because he's being called in for an emergency employee review in turn because he's been hanging around with someone who's melted his heart slightly too much, which leads to fun scenes with Death's fellow employees dropping their guns and agreeing to a knife fight out of 'dignity'.

I have to be honest, by the end the plot had all but disappeared - why 47 was actually killing Belicoff at the end was a bit strange on the surface - it's not like killing him again will actually change anything. At the same time, partly it's about reputation, partly it's about the people who set him up, and partly, I think, it's because this is the man who bought Love for $300 and then tortured and abused her at his whim.

By the end of the film, Love is free - everyone involved in her capture being, well, dead - and Death has something to care for, and treats her to the Vineyard she's always wanted.

It's not a perfect theory - there's the occasionaly lapses between video game and film narrative logic that don't always mesh (why doesn't the FSB chief simply use the radio to tell someone he's stuck in a potentially electric bath somewhere? And what actually happens to the FSB chief? Anyway...) but if you look on the film as the sudden, accidental and pretty meeting of two abstract concepts, it's not a bad thing.

Plus, Dougray Scott kind of wanders through the film trying to catch up with The Embodiment of Death, and when he does finally catch him he only gets to keep him for five minutes before the Americans turn up to free him.

Make of that what you will.