'Hitman: Agent 47' Panel Showcases A High-Octane Assassin [Comic Con 2014]

Fox brought the new Hitman movie, Hitman: Agent 47, to Comic Con today via an understated panel that featured actors Zachary Quinto and Hannah Ware. Rupert Friend, who plays the title character, an assassin introduced in the video game series from Eidos and Square Enix, was unable to attend Comic Con thanks to the shooting schedule for his primary gig, Homeland. Friend offered up a brief intro to the panel via a video message, and the panelists premiered a trailer that showed this new cinematic adaptation of the Hitman games. We can't yet embed the trailer, but we can give you the panel rundown after the break.

The trailer shows a vision of the character that will be more or less familiar depending on the gaming style of various Hitman fans. If you play the games with a rigid adherence to stealth and quiet movement, this trailer won't look much at all like your Hitman. If you're an "all guns blazing" player, it will be more familiar.

Which is to say: there's little evidence in the trailer that this particular Agent 47 is a guy who ever gets the job done quietly. He may, at least, be able to be pretty clever. The trailer highlight finds the killer in an interrogation room facing a cop who is, for some reason, checking out the sniper rifle that belongs to Agent 47. A highly improbable but pretty visually nifty escape sequence follows, involving a table flip and a sniper bullet snapping the handcuffs/chains holding Agent 47 to his chair.

It's a sleek, kinda sexy, very European-looking bit of footage. Big explosions, with a couple of pretty solid-lookign setpieces. I don't know that it looks like Hitman, exactly, but it looks like a competently-made action film.

As for the panel, the two actors didn't provide too much insight into the film, though they did describe a triangle of sorts between their two characters and Agent 47. Specifically, Ware and Quinto said the story really comes into focus via the relationships of their two characters to Agent 47, but precisely how that plays out it something we'll see in the future.

Hitman: Agent 47 is directed by Aleksander Bach. It also stars Thomas Kretschmann, Dan Bakkedahl, and Ciaran Hinds. The film is set for release on February 27, 2015.