Sometimes our favorite actors become paid killer, who display no emotions whatsoever. Here are ten most famous hitman roles in movies.
1. Cogan (Brad Pitt) in Killing Them Softly
Present the main competitive section at Cannes in 2012, the film tells the story of Jackie Cogan, a hitman hired by the mob to investigate the theft occurred during a high-stakes poker game and to liquidate the perpetrators. Killing Them Softly is based on the novel by George V. Higgins – a policier thriller which combines violence and black comedy. As a drawback of the film – though he should be the protagonist of the film, Pitt appears in the movie after the middle of the film.
2. Vincent (Tom Cruise) in Collateral (2004)
Vincent (Tom Cruise) is a contract killer. When a drug cartel is that in the situation of being brought before a panel of judges, an operation to identify and kill the key witness is organized. Vincent arrives in Los Angeles to shoot down five people. Vincent is the first negative role of Tom Cruise.
3. Léon (Jean Reno) in Léon (1994)
Léon is a born killer, invisible, invincible, illiterate, with no bank account, who takes care of the plant and drinks milk. That is until he meets Mathilda, a little girl aged 12. Luc Besson was inspired in bringing Léon screen by the character “the cleaner” from Nikita.
4. Nikita (Anne Parillaud) in Nikita (1990)
Anne Parillaud plays the main role, that of a government agent, specially trained for ordered executions. Parilland Anne was awarded a Cesar for Best Actor.
5. Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) in Pulp Fiction (1994)
Pulp Fiction is a bloody odyssey of several characters placed in three stories that intersect. Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega are two paid assassins working for Marsellus Wallace. The two enter into the most outrageous situations and the performance of the two actors is simple memorable.
6. John Chow (Chow Yun-Fat) in The Killer (1989)
The xxtremely violent film of John Woo has also a romantic element. The hitman John Chow decides to change his life immediately after the last “mission”. During it, he a young singer to go blind. To find the money for the operation, he still accept yet another contract.
7. Joss Baumont (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Le Professionnel (1981)
Joss Baumont is a secret agent whose mission is to kill the President of African countries, Njala.
8. Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant) in Hitman (2007)
This nameless agent has an astounding precision, he is able to kill in cold blood, not because he likes it, but because he was taught: to execute tasks with extreme professionalism. Agent 47 was an orphaned child who was raised by an organization that trains orphans to become professional assassins. At maturity, after their “graduation”, the newly assassins have to wander the world having their heads shaved and a barcode tattooed on the back of their head. They will be employed by various governments to do their dirty work. Agent 47 has the mission to shoot the President of Russia.
9. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in No Country for Old Men (2008)
Chigurh is a mysterious character, a gangster who flips a coin when it comes to deciding whether a person lives or dies.
The film is an adaptation of the novel written by Cormac McCarthy. The Cohen brothers who directed the film are also co-authors of the script. The story begins when Llewelyn Moss discovers by chance the final scene of a massacre of rival gangs, with corpses riddled with bullets, a truck filled with bags of heroin and not far from the massacre a bag with two million dollars in cash. When Moss takes the money, he triggers a chain reaction of catastrophic violence.
10. Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) in The Mechanic (2011)
Arthur Bishop is a “mechanic” – an elite assassin, meaning he has a strict ethical code and a unique talent to eliminate easy targets as silently as possible. It’s a job that requires professional perfection and total detachment towards targets to be eliminated, and Bishop is the best in the business. He is tricked to kill his good friend and mentor Harry, and about it, Bishop is anything but detached. His next assignment is a self-imposed one: he wants all those involved in this work to be dead. This mission, however, becomes more complicated when he’s approached by Harry’s son, Steve, who has the same thirst for revenge and a crazy and extraordinary determination to “steal the job” from Bishop.
