Early reviews for Hitman movie Agent 47 aren’t great

The early reviews for Agent 47, the movie based on the Hitman video game franchise, are out – and they’re not great.

Twentieth Century Fox is hoping the Rupert Friend-starring action reboot – which pretends the 2007 movie doesn’t exist – will be the start of a successful new motion picture franchise, but box office receipts will have to betray critical opinion if the studio’s plan is to be realised.

Jordan Hoffman of The Guardian awarded the film 2/5, stating: “This vaguely science-fiction action picture based on a video game is an idiotic mess with a bafflingly dense prologue, an endless final battle, lifeless performances and anticlimactic twists, but it does have a degree of visual flair.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Farber offers: “Hitman: Agent 47 turns out to be exactly the kind of fast-paced, mind-numbing thriller that studios churn out to fill screens during the dog days of summer.”

Meanwhile, Variety’s Justin Chang states: “”hile Aleksander Bach’s directing debut is indeed the junky, incoherent shoot-’em-up we feared it might be, to dismiss it as just another late-August studio craptacular doesn’t quite do it justice.

Edward Douglas of CoomingSoon awards the film 5.5/10, noting: “Any potential Hitman: Agent 47 may have had is squandered as it gets marred down in some of its more inane ideas with a cliffhanger ending so lame it ruins any chance of enjoying (or remembering) much of what came before.”

Agent 47 opens in the UK next Thursday, August 27.