Missing the mark

If you were a super-secret, international assassin being pursued by relentless agents from Interpol, would you:

A) try to be as inconspicuous as possible and slip into situations virtually unnoticed? Or

B) wear a bright red tie and crop your hair so close that the giant UPC symbol tattooed on the back of your head would stick out like a Target logo?

That's a problem with adapting a popular video game into a motion picture. In a game, nothing needs to make narrative sense.

In Xavier Gens' "Hitman" -- based on the video game of the same title -- action star Timothy Olyphant demonstrates all the emotion effusiveness of Chuck Norris as the mysterious Agent 47. Part of a super-secret organization of killer elites, Agent 47 discovers he has been set up in a conspiracy involving the assassination of a moderate Russian president.

Now, Agent 47 has been targeted by members of his own super-secret organization of killer elites. (This shouldn't be too hard since they all shave their heads and have UPC symbols tattooed on their scalps.)

Agent 47 is also pursued by dogged Interpol Inspector Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott), out to stop this "ghost" assassin that nobody else thinks exists. Meanwhile, Agent 47 reluctantly adopts a female sidekick, Nika (Olga Kurylenko), a prostitute with a heart of bold. Nika likes Agent 47. "You're really quite charming when you're not killing people!" she swoons.

She runs around in a pair of thong panties and constantly tries to have sex with 47, but he 86s that. Super-secret assassins don't like physical contact, unless it's poking out eyes or kicking in someone's bloodied head.

Half the time, I couldn't tell who was fighting in the blurry, overedited action sequences, many of them listless re-creations of stunts from the "Die Hard" movies and John Woo's celebrated Hong Kong thrillers.

Geoff Zanelli's throbbing, pulsating score props up the film's sense of ominous intrigue, elements that the visual part -- a mishmash of harsh flash-cuts and somnambulant slow-motion shots -- fails to inspire.

It doesn't help that Olyphant looks a tad geekish for a mysterious assassin, and his voice sounds similar enough to Billy Bob Thornton's that his line readings almost sound comical.

The dialogue in "Hitman," credited to Skip Woods, is like something you'd hear during a Saturday morning secret-agent cartoon show where characters constantly explain their motivations. ("I'm going to finish the job I was hired to do," Agent 47 declares, "then find out who's behind this!")

Neither Woods nor Gens ever checked the script for dumbness, as in the opening where a narrator explains that Agent 47 belongs to an "organization so secret that no one knows it exists."

Wouldn't the agents with those giant UPC symbols on their heads know about it?

"Hitman"

One star out of four

Opens today

Timothy Olyphant as Agent 47

Dougray Scott as Mike Whittier

Olga Kurylenko as Nika

Written by Skip Woods. Produced by Pierre-Ange Le Pogram. Directed by Xavier Gens. A 20th Century Fox release. Rated R (violence, nudity) Running time: 100 minutes.