Of the films inspired by video games, Hitman far surpasses most of its predecessors. Most game-inspired movies lack plot, character development, and anything resembling decent dialogue – good movies require these details, good games find them superfluous. The director of Hitman overcame this difficulty by remaking The Bourne Identity, cleverly changing the names of the characters and the super-secret-assassin organization to disguise the lift.

Like Jason Bourne, the Hitman has been trained from a nebulous past to be the ultimate killing machine, yet becomes a pawn abused by his own company. He is hired to kill a Russian diplomat only to be hunted by his own agency for failing to kill the Russian diplomat. To save his life and exonerate his name, he must team up with a European girl who willingly helps even though she fails to fully understand their dilemma. She finds herself increasingly attracted to him even though she fears his murderous nature. Sound familiar?

As for the changes, well… the super-secret-assassin organization is a religious order that marks and numbers its operatives, making them clone-like. It begs the question: If you have trained an army of super-secret-assassins, why tattoo a barcode on their heads and then shave their heads? It looks cool, but nothing gives away a super-secret-assassin as readily as a completely visible barcode on a Yul Brenner level of baldness. Interpol could track these guys on satellite if Interpol had satellite. (In the movie, the Interpol agents, while clever, lack this advantage).

The R is for violence and excessive, pointless, frontal nudity—the last a shame as it keeps this film from being a Bourne Identity knockoff that could make a good movie night for a couple, relegating it to a better-than-average game-inspired movie, which isn’t much of a recommendation.

Kyle Smith, a film critic for the New York Post, had an intriguing essay in Friday’s Opinion Journal that, for all its merit, left me wondering why so many of us reflexively assume that to oppose violence is to be anti-American. Smith wanders about, first reviewing what sounds like an absolutely dreadful new Jodie Foster film, and then taking a few jabs at liberals, before settling down to his thesis, which is that liberals like movies that question the use of violence. Such movies, Smith implies, are anti-American. To substantiate his point, Smith points to two recent films, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and “A History of Violence,” which he says capture the liberal ethos regarding violence, to wit, that it is bad and somehow caused by nefarious forces — in the former movie, a shady government, and in the latter, a violent American culture.

It’s a bad habit for conservatives to adopt this reflex of defending whatever liberals critique. Eric Breindel, a New York Post journalist from a more thoughtful era, once wrote that “some things are true even though Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy said they were.” The same can be said of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. The fact that liberals approve of a storyline in which Jason Bourne, the haunted ex-assassin from the Bourne trilogy of movies, was trained by the U.S. government, shouldn’t lead conservatives to suggest that the only pro-American stance is to be in favor of CIA-trained assassins. If conservatism is about, in part, a rightful distrust of large, unaccountable government bureaucracies, then shouldn’t conservatives applaud films that pick on the CIA?

More disturbing, however, is the notion that to oppose violence is somehow anti-American. A conservative understands that in a fallen world, violence may sometimes be necessary. But a conservative, and especially a Christian, also mourns the destruction of life. Smith notes that left-wing Hollywood filmmakers must be disappointed “that audiences remain more interested in crisp revenge than messy guilt.” It seems to me that genuine conservatives, and Christians above all, ought to be disappointed as well. That doesn’t mean that every movie which attempts to portray the true ugliness of violence should be applauded (Smith mentions some real stinkers). But it does mean that we ought to admit that violence is an ugly, terrible thing, even if Oliver Stone says so.