Based on the video game, this actually resembles a uniquely boring, feature-length Audi commercial, incidentally intent on pinching ideas from the first two Terminators. It’s a punishingly vacuous shoot-’em-up-and-grind-’em-down-with-dullness thriller featuring Rupert Friend as the notorious rabbit-faced assassin, his face set in a thin-lipped expression of supposedly chilling impassivity that makes you think he should be nibbling lettuce.
He is Agent 47, the rogue product of a now suppressed secret military programme breeding uber-killers. He goes around in his sharp suit carrying a black bag with all his way cool guns’n’ammo (but no change of clothes, worryingly), unsmilingly topping dozens of expendable types in a time-honoured movie manner that the real-life military and secret services have bafflingly yet to adopt: ie shooting with arm balletically outstretched looking insouciantly in the opposite direction.
Agent 47’s latest target is a beautiful, troubled young woman called Katia (Hannah Ware) who finds there is only one person who can protect her: tough yet caring Zachary Quinto. Ciarán Hinds does his level best to endow his own role with some gravitas: the haunted, bearded scientist who created the “Agent” programme in the first place and now spends his downtime sketching flowers. Flinch as the armour-piercing bullet of tedium penetrates your cranium.
