The Top 10 Best Movie Depictions of Video Games

08. Hitman Deja Vu, Vuja De Hitman

Pay close attention to the TV in the background of the hotel room around 0:40 in the video embedded above...

What you are seeing is the tutorial level "Death of a Showman" from the PS2 version of 2006s Hitman: Blood Money.

You have to ask yourself, can the director of a movie seriously laugh at himself? What about laughing at the movie he is making? How about not only laughing at himself but inviting the AUDIENCE to do it too?

File this under 'Not taking ourselves too seriously' then, because in 2007's epic motion picture 'Hitman' (directed by Xavier Gens, and staring Timothy Olyphant as Agent 47, and Olga Kurylenko as Nika Boronina), Gens does just that.

A self-revealed major fan of the video games, Gens didn't originally plan the homage that eventually ended up in the film. But because the story in Hitman was loosely based upon the entire Hitman series, he felt that he could get away with a number of background homage gestures, among which are the game scene, and several set dressing elements that were taken directly from the games.

The character of Nika (played by Olga Kurylenko) is one of the game-focused homages: she was loosely based on the character of Lei Ling, who Agent 47 rescues several times - once in Codename 47, and again in Silent Assassin, while he has a pleasant flashback memory of her in Contracts.

The 'Death Ballet' scene in which 47 faces off against another ICA Hitman was choreographed and filmed as an homage to Chinese director John Woo, who is famous for his mastery of the ultra-violent Tong/Gokudō gangster genre of films.

There were additional scenes that were cut from the movie after Fox, unhappy with the rating the film was given by the MPAA, brought in director Nicolas De Toth (best known for the films The Sum of All Fears and Live Free or Die Hard) to re-cut and re-edit the movie to achieve the commercial goals that the studio insisted upon.

As a result two of the best scenes - including the train station platform scene - were cut, thus costing the audience most of the important exposition for the character of Nika. De Toths editing of the film made it necessary to re-shoot a number of scenes, which caused the film to miss its targeted release date, which was originally set for the first weekend of October, 2007. It did not release until late in November of that year.