Hitman, a lone and mysterious killer, familiarized into gaming history and now on the silver screen in the movie ‘Hitman’. To celebrate the move from game console to silver screen, we decided to take a closer look at this mystery man and his hidden past…
‘Why does a good man decide to kill?’ So asks the HITMAN, Agent 47, the mysterious killer. Of his past, little is known beyond the brief flashes of a shaven-headed childhood, where he is grouped with other youngsters in a sterile, clinical world, which play through the opening credits. When he first meets Nika, a similar image fizzles through his thoughts, but then there is silence.
So where does 47’s story begin? According to a trilogy of webisodes released through the Hitman website, it all begins at an Institute for the Criminally Insane. This is a wretched place, a mist-shrouded gothic mansion, lost in the middle of an aching, lonely landscape, where the screaming and wailing of the caged lunatics, deviants and psychopaths drowns out the darker activity that crackles away behind the institute’s iron-wrought gates.
There, deep in the bowels of the forlorn mansion, an eminent geneticist, Dr Wolfgang Ort-Meyer, works night and day, labouring to fulfil his designation: the creation of human replicants. His work started years earlier, in a suitably grisly fashion, his benefactors providing him with the bodies of the world’s most dangerous criminals, their sin-wracked bodies to be genetically harvested for organs required by wounded Foreign Legionnaires. As time wore on, his benefactors grew disenchanted with his progress. They betrayed him, prompting the enraged doctor to take his work in an even more sinister direction. He chose to create the perfect human specimen. Its purpose: the kill its creator’s enemies. To kill them all.
As the doctor laboured with his manic genetic experiments, the early results proved less than encouraging, Ort-Meyer created a grim crop of horrors, none of whom who survived. When the doctor got to his 45th experiment, still he failed. Sample 46, too, was a disaster. But, then, at last, came specimen 47. Dr Wolfgang Ort-Meyer had found a specimen he could train (and tattoo with a strange bar code). This is how the bald assassin was born. He was then bio-genetically engineered. He became a supreme physical specimen.
For Dr Ort-Meyer, however, that was not enough. He introduced his prodigy to a merciless training regime, where 47 was readied in the art of combat, demolitions, language studies, and, of course, firearms. He excelled at them all. His only failing was his psychological development. He was antagonistic to his nurses and he was aggressive with his doctors. They thought him overly emotional.
They were right. Those emotions drove 47 to murder. Armed with just an ink pen, he slew one of Ort-Meyer’s underlings, Dr Loomis, and escaped from the institute. As he stepped out into the night, he looked at the world for the first time. Behind him was the only home he’d ever known, ahead of him was a freedom he could only dreamed existed.
When 47 escaped, Ort-Meyer looked on with glee. This was his intention. For him, 47 was now ready to be unleashed on the world. ‘Now it begins’, he chuckled. The doctor knew what would drive his creation. As 47 begins his quest, Ort-Meyer employs a seductive girl to feed him the information he wants. The genetically crafted killer discovers the secret behind has dark existence; he discovers the identities of his evil DNA donors, his ‘five fathers’, and he makes them answer for their sins. He despatches them all.
As the first of them falls, for the first time 47 understands his purpose: he will target the evil that infects the world. He will become The Hitman.
