Maxim’s Movie Reviews and Opinions Blog

It was pretty entertaining, but overall weak. It’s a cross-over between “Bourne” and “Ultra-Violet” with “Matrix”-style shootouts: a character from a comic book in the role of spy/assassin who was raised to kill quickly and efficiently. I thought Timothy Olyphant was very effective. And I liked his costume: in the beginning it was white shirt, in the rest of the movie a black suit with red tie and reminded me of Rene Magritte’s painting “Son of Man”. The bold head, the tattoo, black gloves, big guns! He almost walked off the page of a comic! Olyphant is great in the action movie, but he proven himself to be a very versatile actor by his work in other movies such as Live Free or Die Hard (2007), The Girl Next Door (2004), A Man Apart (2003), Dream Catcher (2003), The Safety of Objects (2001), Gone in 60 seconds (2000) and many more. Beautiful Ukrainian model/actress Olga Kurylenki was also great. She already won the best actress award on Brooklyn International Film festival for her role as Iris in 2005 L’Annulaire - an steamy erotic drama about an affair of a young girl with her boss based on Yoko Ogawa’s novel.

A large part of the movie was set St. Petersburg, Russia, and as usual, all Russian stuff was bad beyond the worst stereotypes. Apparently, the large number of the crew members are Bulgarian, which explains why the characters spoke incomprehensible Russian and almost every word was misspelled. “People’s Theater” sign was written in Bulgarian - that’s a theater in the middle of St. Petersburg! “Post Office” was written in Ukrainian. Indeed, all three Slavic languages use Cyrillic letters, so I guess film makers thought that’s good enough - who cares that words are misspelled as long as they use Cyrillic alphabet? And costume designers who sew the costumes for the FSB characters clearly were in a rush or didn’t care enough to write “S” in “FSB” on the costumes of internal affairs officers up side down. And by the way, people do not sit in the Orthodox church - there are no benches in them. Russian Orthodox Christians stand in the church. That’s common knowledge. Even idiotic movies like “Red Heat” had better Russians in them. And Russia doesn’t have a border with Turkey (not counting the water-border on the Black Sea)! Bulgaria does, though. Oh, and one of the funniest moments was that black INTERPOL officer Jenkins (Michael Offei) trying to blend in in the crowd on the train station. Dude, you are in Russia! You may be the only black person in the whole city of 10 million! And you are trying to sneak in on a trained assassin by blending in with the Russian crowd?

The plot of the movie has nothing to do with the religious tone of the trailers. I believe the movie is based on the video game. The action scenes involve bear-hand combat, guns, grenades, an attack helicopter and swords. Hey, any respectable assassin wants to die a respectable death (I suppose).

Trivia: when the project began, another bold man was to star as Agent-47: Vin Diesel.

p.s.
Before the show during the previews they showed a trailer for yet another Rambo. He he.