Remember in the summer of 2007, when you saw Die Hard with a Vengeance and you asked yourself if it was possible for villain Timothy Olyphant to show fewer facial expressions? Then you saw Hitman and you were all like, “Oh, I guess it is possible.”
As Agent 47, an assassin betrayed by his former organization, Olyphant plays bald very well which, if you’ve ever played the Hitman video game — or even just seen the box — you understand is essential to the movie. It’s also the film’s most illogical part. Whose genius idea was it to create a super-secret organization of bald assassins with bar codes on the back of their heads? That dude’s identifiable a mile away!
The Doom PC game was a juggernaut when it came out. Following up on the success of the Nazi first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D, Doom took off like a rocket to a Hell-spawn infested Mars. It remained the standard for first-person shooters—where the player sees everything from the perspective of the game’s character—for years.
The film version, starring The Rock, employs a scene shot from this perspective, something that was rarely employed in cinema before The Blair Witch Project‘s nauseating stretches of handheld camera. In said scene, The Rock’s character goes around shooting everything in sight, the barrel of his gun sticking suggestively up from the bottom of the screen. It’s like the audience as a whole is playing Doom on a really big screen. Fanboys loved it. The rest of the movie might as well not have even existed.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
