Misplaced Pages

Hitman: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactively← Previous editNext edit →Content deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 17:33, 24 March 2012 edit70.246.62.9 (talk) →Video games← Previous edit Revision as of 18:04, 24 March 2012 edit undoGray eyes (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users30,294 edits →ReferencesNext edit →
Line 120: Line 120:
] ]


]
]
]
]
] ]
]
]
]
]

Revision as of 18:04, 24 March 2012

This redirect is about the criminal occupation. For other uses, see Hitman (disambiguation).
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Hitman" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A hitman or hitwoman is a person hired to kill another person.

Hitmen in organized crime

Hitmen are largely linked to the world of organized crime. Hitmen are hired people who kill people for money. Notable examples include Murder, Inc.,

Other cases involving hitmen

These are non-Mafia killings, or attempted killings, that involved a hitman. In some of these cases the "hitman" was not necessarily a "professional" hitman, but a paid amateur.

Hitmen

Notable victims of hitmen

  • Li Fuguo a Tang Dynasty Eunuch killed by a hitman hired by Emperor Tang Daizong
  • Shiori Ino was a 21-year-old University student killed by hitman Yoshifumi Kubota, who served 18 years in prison for the killing. He was paid by her ex-boyfriend and his brother; the case gained some notoriety in Japan.
  • Grady Stiles, freak show performer whose family hired a hitman to kill him because of his abusiveness
  • Ji Yunqing, a Chinese Shanghai Triad boss affiliated with Wang Jingwei's Puppet Regime in the late 1930s murdered by BIS hitman Zhan Seng.

Notable cases of hiring a hitman

Hitmen in fiction

Anime

  • In the anime Darker than Black, the main character often performs contract killings for various organizations.
  • In the anime and manga Dragon Ball, a mercenary named Tao Pai Pai is hired by the Red Ribbon Army to kill Goku.
  • In the anime Gungrave, the main character is a hitman for the Mafia.
  • The anime Reborn! contains several hitmen and women. Tsuna Sawada (the main character), along with his school friends, are trained by a hitman to succeed the previous Vongola Family.

Comics and cartoons

Film

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (June 2008)

Hitmen have, at times, been a notable part of crime films.

The James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun, features Francisco Scaramanga. Scaramanga is a high-priced hit man, supposedly the best in the world, charging one million dollars per kill. He's best known for being "The man with the golden gun", because he only uses bullets made of gold in a fictitious, 4.2 mm cartridge. All of Scaramanga's dealings go through his henchman Nick Nack, which allows Scaramanga to be anonymous.

In the mid-1990s to the 2000s, several "offbeat" portrayals of hitmen arose.

In the 2005 black comedy The Matador, Pierce Brosnan portrays the fictional hitman Julian Noble, an experienced hitman who suffers a mental breakdown, causing him to freeze during the last seconds of the job.

Romantic comedy has included assassins

A few portrayals of hitmen have earned nominations or awards.

In other countries the vision of the hitman is often one of tragic, individual with a solitary existence.

  • In the 1967 French film, Le Samouraï, Jef Costello is an example of this.
  • Furthermore, the film Ghost Dog takes inspiration from it.
  • In the aforementioned Léon: The Professional his existence outside of hits revolves around his houseplant and watching old films.
  • In the 1989 film, The Killer, the main character, Ah Jong, attempts to perform one last hit as a means of setting right an injustice that he had previously caused.

Video games

  • The main character of the video game series Hitman was genetically engineered by a man called Dr. Ort-Meyer in an insane asylum in Romania. He is known only as Agent 47. 47 is highly regarded in the criminal underworld, so much so that many consider him to be a myth. The gameplay revolves around infiltrating an area, executing a target (or targets) and escaping without apprehension. Although it isn't compulsory, the Hitman games encourage the player to use stealth and cunning maneuvers to eliminate targets, as opposed to making use of pure firepower. A film adaption which deviated widely from its source material was released in 2007. It was confirmed that a fifth game would be in production.
  • In some videogames, such as the Grand Theft Auto series, the main character is given tasks akin to acting as a Hitman. This is most obviously shown in Grand Theft Auto IV with Niko Bellic, who is frequently hired as a hitman in the game.
  • In the Elder Scrolls series, there is a group called the Dark Brotherhood, which is a group of assassins that are akin to the nature of being a hitman. This group has appeared in all Elder Scrolls games since Daggerfall. Groups like the Morag Tong also perform contract killings in the series, and have been a playable faction in Morrowind. However, the nature of the Morag Tong is different from the Dark Brotherhood, since the Morag Tong is a legal assassination group in the province of Morrowind (till it was defunct) and played a more justice-oriented role, and the Dark Brotherhood plays a role more similar to that of hired assassins

See also

References

Categories: