Hitman, the movie: don't believe the haters

Green and converts CO2 to O2?

I believe the correct answer is "plant".

ranalin wrote:
kilroy0097 wrote:
Devmani wrote:

Pfft the Emo killer look is so played out. Get that man a chocolate ice cream cone and lets see him smile! Death needs more happiness imo.

So it looks like you need a movie in which the killer is happy about killing and it's a highlight of their day. American Psycho should fit your needs then. He was quite happy and joyful in his killings.

"Stop looking at it and lick it!"

I believe its "Don't just stare at it. Eat it.", but now we're just splitting hairs.

Lobster if you're trying to make a reference to the movie Running Man having absolutely nothing in common with the original King story Running Man and that you should never confuse a movie adaptation with its source, then I completely agree. Otherwise, your oceanic crustacean logic escapes me.

unntrlaffinity wrote:

I believe the correct answer is "plant".

You must be awesome fun at parties.

Thin_J wrote:
unntrlaffinity wrote:

I believe the correct answer is "plant".

You must be awesome fun at parties.

Only if there's an open bar.

I saw it over the weekend and I'll say it could have been much worse. I enjoyed it. It helps to have a hot, hot, HOT Russian chick in the movie.

Grenn wrote:

I saw it over the weekend and I'll say it could have been much worse. I enjoyed it. It helps to have a hot, hot, HOT Russian chick in the movie.

Get in the trunk!

In Blood MOney it was far easier to go in and shoot the place up than sneak around. Perhaps the film is accurate after all.

Blood Money was quite crap. Good thing I bought it on sale for 7 bucks.

Blood Money did make the total stealth kill paths considerably less obvious. I never found run-n-gun a viable path in it though. It did bother me that my abundant Silent Assassin cash went mostly to upgrading weapons that I could not use and still get Silent Assassin ratings.

1Dgaf wrote:

In Blood MOney it was far easier to go in and shoot the place up than sneak around. Perhaps the film is accurate after all.

That's always been the case with the Hitman games, unless there's a forced failure. The combat AI is too crap, and you're too tough.. At least they went some way towards punishing you for it with the notoriety mechanic, albeit not far enough.

So I made a slightly drunken positive review of a movie and now I'm a plant. Thats cool.

Ha, I'd forgotten who even started the thread. Don't mind Lobster, he's just an ass sometimes.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Ha, I'd forgotten who even started the thread. Don't mind Lobster, he's just an ass sometimes. ;)

Do Lobsters have asses?

Running Man wrote:

So I made a slightly drunken positive review of a movie and now I'm a plant. Thats cool.

I thought it was a movie reference at first, and I was racking my brain for a deeper meaning. Ahnold=Green? was the best I could come up with.

shihonage wrote:

Blood Money was quite crap. Good thing I bought it on sale for 7 bucks.

Insanity!

I thought it was okay, minus the swords... That didn't happen.

Desram wrote:

I thought it was okay, minus the swords... That didn't happen.

That's pretty much the consensus among the 5 of us that went out and saw that this weekend. There's just no in-movie justification for the stupid 4 way standoff that starts that section; so while it's going on, you're still trying to figure out what the hell just happened instead of enjoying a sword fight.

I too went in expecting crap and came out with a very "Well it wasn't pathetically awful like Ultraviolet" attitude.

I even enjoyed certain parts.

The shootout at the place with dude's brother though? Idiotic. I was really with the movie up until then. I also like that the they do let you figure some things out for yourself instead of force feeding you every single detail of what's going on.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Ebert, you fat f*ck, maybe get your head out of your ass and quit spouting nonsense about things you clearly don't understand.

WTF? So you are going to waste this much emotion and bile because Ebert takes the time to clue you in on where he stands, so that you can make a much better judgement about his opinons of movies? I've seen him make the same type comments, and was able to chat with my wife about why I think he is wrong. Then I was able to watch and read more of his reviews with a little better clarity about his bias.

Ebert is a great writer, and his reviews are some of the best when it comes to letting people know if THEY would like the movie, even if he didn't. Your comments are much more appropriately directed at your little rant. Seriously, what you wrote was pathetic and small minded.

Ebert is also the guy who gave "The Usual Suspects" 1.5 out of 4 stars. I read him often, and while he's entertaining to read, his reviews are all over the place. He's also prone to insecurity when evaluating narrow-genre films, because he has trouble determining whether the movie is awful or just staying true to its genre, which makes his 3-star reviews some of the most suspect. He gave "Van Helsing" 3/4 stars, and Sean Penn's pretentious Jack Nicholson vehicle "The Pledge" 3.5 out of 4 stars.

Finally, whenever a movie touches on a political cause, he always chimes in with his political bias in his review, and obviously this plays into his final score as well. Not unlike much of Hollywood, he has trouble separating politics from entertainment.

So yeah, Ebert's got his demons, and his position on videogames is one of them. He certainly should've kept the "debate", that clearly continues raging in his head, out of a movie review.

Jayhawker wrote:

Ebert is a great writer

This is a matter of opinion. Not to mention he comes off as biased half the time and being paid under the table. I feel bad for him and all that he's gone through but some of his latest reviews are like he didn't even see the movie and just going off info he's read about them.

Ebert is an excellent writer when he sticks to movies (although he's not my favourite critic anymore, that honour has gone to the good Dr Kermode), but he really needs to shut up about videogames when he plainly doesn't know what he's talking about. Now everytime I see the word "game" in his reviews I bury my head in my hands and just move on.

shihonage wrote:

Finally, whenever a movie touches on a political cause, he always chimes in with his political bias in his review, and obviously this plays into his final score as well. Not unlike much of Hollywood, he has trouble separating politics from entertainment.

I think it's actually a pretty good thing that his political biases are overt, because that's one of those things that can really affect someone's opinion of a movie. Him talking about how the political text or subtext affects his judgement of a film lets the reader adjust the score according to his own biases.

shihonage wrote:

Ebert is also the guy who gave "The Usual Suspects" 1.5 out of 4 stars. I read him often, and while he's entertaining to read, his reviews are all over the place.

Finally, whenever a movie touches on a political cause, he always chimes in with his political bias in his review, and obviously this plays into his final score as well. Not unlike much of Hollywood, he has trouble separating politics from entertainment.

So yeah, Ebert's got his demons, and his position on videogames is one of them. He certainly should've kept the "debate", that clearly continues raging in his head, out of a movie review.

I definitely don't agree his Usual Suspects verdict, but on the other counts, I like Ebert for exactly that reason, his ratings are less what the movie "deserves" according to the meta-opinion of the nation's critics, and more on whether or not he personally enjoyed a movie. He's perfectly willing to indulge in a guilty pleasure and he gives the thumbs-up to a lot of movies that most other critics would consider beneath them.

Roger Ebert wrote:

"When you ask a friend if "Hellboy" is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to "Mystic River," you're asking if it's any good compared to "The Punisher." And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if "Superman" (1978) is four, then "Hellboy" is three and "The Punisher" is two."

Alien Love Gardener wrote:

Ebert is an excellent writer when he sticks to movies (although he's not my favourite critic anymore, that honour has gone to the good Dr Kermode), but he really needs to shut up about videogames when he plainly doesn't know what he's talking about. Now everytime I see the word "game" in his reviews I bury my head in my hands and just move on.

I think it's actually a pretty good thing that his political biases are overt, because that's one of those things that can really affect someone's opinion of a movie. Him talking about how the political text or subtext affects his judgement of a film lets the reader adjust the score according to his own biases.

I don't see how you can be irritated over his transparency on his video game bias, and then applaud his political transparency. I think both are positive for the very same reason you cite on his politics. That when your tastes diverge from his, you can easily make corrections in your assessment of his opinion. Really, did it take that long for anyone to read those two lines in the Hitman review and get filled with fury?

ranalin wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

Ebert is a great writer

This is a matter of opinion. Not to mention he comes off as biased half the time and being paid under the table. I feel bad for him and all that he's gone through but some of his latest reviews are like he didn't even see the movie and just going off info he's read about them.

I have this conversation all the time. Of course it's a matter of opinion. I hate having a conversation when I say something like "Fallout Boy is a terrible band" and the other person's reply is "That's your opinion."

As for his being paid under the table, I think that's a stretch. The man has been working in movies for decades, and he obviously loves his job, and somehow has managed to retain a sense of humor. I appreciate that about him, and I've never gotten the feeling he was selling his reviews.

As for the calls to "he should keep his opinions on what he knows and to himself", if we all obeyed that advice, these message boards would be nothing but a series of ASCII tumbleweeds.

unntrlaffinity wrote:

I don't see how you can be irritated over his transparency on his video game bias, and then applaud his political transparency. I think both are positive for the very same reason you cite on his politics. That when your tastes diverge from his, you can easily make corrections in your assessment of his opinion. Really, did it take that long for anyone to read those two lines in the Hitman review and get filled with fury?

There's to aspects to my objection: a) he's poorly informed, as evidenced by his Hitman review, and more importantly b) unlike a political movie, video games have absolutely *nothing* to do the content of Hitman the movie. A game's the source material, yes, but if you let your opinion of the *medium* of the source material colour your opinion of the adaptation, you're unspeakably crap.

Which Ebert isn't. He's perfectly capable of evaluating a movie on its own merits. This just him being stuffy about the lowbrow entertainment of the plebes. He should grow up and stop it.

unntrlaffinity wrote:

I have this conversation all the time. Of course it's a matter of opinion. I hate having a conversation when I say something like "Fallout Boy is a terrible band" and the other person's reply is "That's your opinion."

As for his being paid under the table, I think that's a stretch. The man has been working in movies for decades, and he obviously loves his job, and somehow has managed to retain a sense of humor. I appreciate that about him, and I've never gotten the feeling he was selling his reviews.

I like his sense of humor and more often than not i do agree with his reviews but there's been some movies that he seems to rate higher than they deserve.

As for the whole opinion thing i didn't want to start another tangent where we start stacking up items in the great/not great columns and see who comes out on top because after all he is just offering his opinion.

ranalin wrote:

I like his sense of humor and more often than not i do agree with his reviews but there's been some movies that he seems to rate higher than they deserve.

As for the whole opinion thing i didn't want to start another tangent where we start stacking up items in the great/not great columns and see who comes out on top because after all he is just offering his opinion.

I get it, that's generally what happens when Ebert enters a thread. It's just frustrating from both ends.

Alien Love Gardener wrote:

Which Ebert isn't. He's perfectly capable of evaluating a movie on its own merits. This just him being stuffy about the lowbrow entertainment of the plebes. He should grow up and stop it.

I disagree about the point on video games and movie content, I think absolutely one affects the other in the same way comics influence comic movies. But for the other point, he could leave it out, but it's still heavily influencing his rating. If he includes it, you're able to make the judgment on his bias on your own. It feels like people want him to shelve his opinions in an area they're sensitive about, which is both impractical and impossible, and I don't feel silence is an adequate replacement.

I got caught up in the Ebert debate, like I always do (what can I say, I'm a big fan), and I've realized we've gone way off actually discussing the movie.

Jayhawker wrote:

WTF? So you are going to waste this much emotion and bile because Ebert takes the time to clue you in on where he stands, so that you can make a much better judgement about his opinons of movies? I've seen him make the same type comments, and was able to chat with my wife about why I think he is wrong. Then I was able to watch and read more of his reviews with a little better clarity about his bias.

Ebert is a great writer, and his reviews are some of the best when it comes to letting people know if THEY would like the movie, even if he didn't. Your comments are much more appropriately directed at your little rant. Seriously, what you wrote was pathetic and small minded.

So wildly off-base that I have to wonder if you bothered to even read what I wrote or my back-and-forth with unntrlaffinity. That part of the review has nothing at all to do with whether or not people would like the movie.

Opinion on the movie (not roper's specious view on games):

Disclaimer: I've never played a Hitman game (though my sometimes socio-pathic friends Jenny and Sarah were obsessed with it).

Its basically a gene splicing of a Bourne movie with one of the shoot 'em ups from the 80's. Its got fantastic locals, a good bit of intrigue, an assasin wiht a troubled past. Its also unapologetically cheesey. If you can let go of ther serious, (which should be pretty easy I think), then you've got "a pretty alright film" to quote myself leaving the theater.

I enjoyed Olyphant's take on 47. It was a nice change of pace from the aforementioned emo killer. That sort of shtick is part of what ruined the punisher (the other half was the trying to redeem the character). And yes, Olga. Olga's hot. A bit mongolian for my taste, but undeniablely hot.

For the movie itself... meh. Wasn't as bad as i thought it could be, but it wasn't as good as i was hoping it to be. BTW Olga Kurylenko is hot!

I laughed out loud when he jumps into a window with kids playing the Hitman game.