Watching Hitman: Agent 47 feels like sitting on your friend’s couch, watching him or her play a bro-shooter, kill-em-all video game. The story sucks, the violence is fake-looking, the action is nonsensical, and there’s a general sense of detachment since you aren’t directly partaking in the melee. It’s moderately entertaining for about five minutes, and then you get the sudden, uncontrollable urge to shut the whole thing down and go grab a coffee or something.

The movie’s based on (whaddya know?) the bro-shooter, kill-em-all Hitman video game series and is directed by Aleksander Bach, a first-timer who’s mostly helmed stylish commercials. It stars Homeland‘s Rupert Friend as 47, a suit-wearing, bald-headed assassin who’s been deprogrammed by evil scientists to not feel emotion or empathy, and reprogrammed to be an unstoppable death-bringer. The program that created him was destroyed a long time ago, but now some bad dudes are plotting to revive it, and 47 makes it his mission to stop that from happening. He knows he’s a murdering asshole, and he doesn’t want them to make more murdering assholes. His name comes from the fact that he’s the 47th iteration of the diabolical experiment, and it turns out that to save the world, he has to seek the help of a newer, more deadly model.

There was another movie based on the video game (it starred Timothy Olyphant and was equally vapid and horrible), and Agent 47 makes the same mistake its predecessor did, transplanting the video game’s main character to the screen essentially unchanged. Video game heroes are traditionally blank, personality-less proxies for us to project ourselves onto, which makes them great to take control of when you want to play puppetmaster and raise some hell in a polygonal playland. But they don’t work as movie heroes because they aren’t interesting enough as characters to wrap a story around them. This, mostly, is why video game movies are generally so lousy.

At the center of the story’s super-soldier controversy is Katia (Hanna Ware), the daughter of the mad scientist who started the Hitman program and is now in hiding (Ciaran Hinds). She’s on the run because everyone, including 47, is after her, believing she’s the only one on earth who can lead them to her dad. With 47 in pursuit, she meets a man named John Smith (Zachary Quinto) who claims to be her savior (with a name like that, he’s got to be legit, right?). The movie turns into a really, really cheap Terminator knock-off for a while as Katia and John try to outrun 47, and after that schtick is over with, things devolve into generic super-spy, big-action trash.

Bach’s stuff actually looks decent most of the time: the action is organized and the cinematography is smooth. There’s no artistry to any of it, though; no edginess or innovation to the car chases, the hand-to-hand fights, or even Hitman‘s signature dual-wielding shootouts. It’s standard stuff, and with such a lifeless story backing it up, it all feels plasticky and hollow. Everything feels derivative or flat-out stolen: when 47 is being interrogated in a room full of military personnel, one of the soldiers tries to intimidate him, prompting him to robotically retort, “I’m not locked in here with you—you’re locked in here with me!”

The script isn’t notable on any front, but the actors are admirable in that they mostly try to take their job seriously. Quinto and Hinds make the movie easier to watch when they’re with us, but Ware and Friend aren’t as compelling. The special effects show that closes out the movie is underwhelming, but what hurts is that the ending teases future installments of the series.

The release of Margin Call was done at a perfect time, a time where Occupy Wall Street is currently going on in New York protesting the top 1% of the wealthy. This film is about that 1%. Written and directed by first-time filmmaker J.C. Chandor, the film depicts the events that led up to the Financial Crisis of 2008 from an unnamed investment bank.

Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey) has been with this financial investment firm for 34 years. He is the head boss of the risk assessment team. He is going through a rough time, his dog is close to dying and the majority of the risk assessment team is being laid off today. To complicate things exponentially, a discovery is soon made that could end the company.

Right before Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) was laid off, he was on to something pretty important. The senior risk analyst voices this concern to the job consultants but they did not seem to care. He even brought it up when speaking to his boss as he was packing up his personal belongings of his desk but it did not seem important to his boss either. Finally, as he is about the leave the building for the last time, he hands a USB drive off to one of his co-workers named Peter (Zachary Quinto) and says “Take a look at it, be careful”.

After Peter crunches the numbers from Eric’s file he discovers that Eric was really on to something huge. He frantically alerts his co-workers of his findings. Each person he tells reacts the same way, completely shocked. The news climbs up the ranks and eventually Sam is notified.

Sam calls for all the senior partners of the company for an emergency meeting to discuss these findings. The CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) is brought in by helicopter. Attempting to explain the situation to him is difficult because he does not understand all of the business side of the corporation, he only manages it. Once they speak in plain terms he quickly understands the severity of the problem.

There was a lot of finance jargon thrown around throughout Margin call, enough to where I think it would confuse the average person. I myself was at a loss when terms like MBS market and ABX index were being talked about. However, if you are fairly educated in Economics than you would probably appreciate the fact they did not dumb down the script.

My favorite scene in the film is when Eric speaks about a bridge he once built. The bridge connected a border town in Ohio to one in West Virginia over the Ohio River. They way he mathematically breaks down all the numbers to show how much time and money that bridge saved – all in all he figures he saved 559,020 days by building that bridge based on time/money savings.

Margin Call will walk away with at least one award from the 2012 Independent Spirit awards, as one category has already been decided at the same time the nominations were announced. They will be presented with the Robert Altman award which is given to the director, casting director and its ensemble cast. The film is also nominated for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay for the 2012 awards.

Through the course of the film, you find out that the personal finances of the bankers themselves tend not to be very good. All of them are making at least six figures, yet every one of them spent nearly all of it. Greed and ignorance has transcended from the work environment to their personal lives. All of the characters are shocked when they hear how much the other person makes, but equally as shocking is how little they have left of it.

It was not just that Margin Call was a little slow moving, it is that the film feels like it is on the same level the entire time. Aside from the very beginning, there was no real excitement to the film, I never felt that there was a climax to the story. That being said, it is a very accurate depiction of the events leading up to the financial crisis, as well as the lives of the people that actually work for investment banks.