The new trailer for 20th Century Fox’s August action flick Hitman: Agent 47 doesn’t make any excuses for what the film is: an exceptionally slick and kinetic video game adaptation packed with brutal fights and ridiculous gymnastics. If you could use some escapism while taking refuge from the hot summer sun, this movie is certainly looking like a good option.
Rupert Friend, of Homeland fame, stars in the action pic as the titular agent, a genetically engineered assassin who rejects his programming in order to track down his creators and earn his freedom. He’s joined in that pursuit by Hannah Ware, who’s seemingly playing another agent unaware of her conditioning. Zachary Quinto co-stars as a well-dressed baddie, and Ciaran Hinds also has a key role.
The real star of this show appears to be director Aleksander Bach, who has packed Agent 47 with some absolutely ridiculous, wildly entertaining stunts, from the hitman’s escape from law enforcement officers to his one-man assault on an army of enemy agents. There’s even some Matrix-style bullet-fu! If the trailer is indicative of the film as a whole (not an assumption to make lightly, of course), this could very easily be one of the year’s most propulsive action-thrillers. Whether it will be one of the rare video game adaptations to actually be any good in dramatic terms is a bit more of a stretch.
Hitman: Agent 47 opens August 21.
HITMAN: AGENT 47 centers on an elite assassin who was genetically engineered from conception to be the perfect killing machine, and is known only by the last two digits on the barcode tattooed on the back of his neck. He is the culmination of decades of research  and forty-six earlier Agent clones — endowing him with unprecedented strength, speed, stamina and intelligence. His latest target is a mega-corporation that plans to unlock the secret of Agent 47’s past to create an army of killers whose powers surpass even his own. Teaming up with a young woman who may hold the secret to overcoming their powerful and clandestine enemies, 47 confronts stunning revelations about his own origins and squares off in an epic battle with his deadliest foe.
