The producers of “Hitman,” a new film opening this week, have spun their movie off of a series of video games that began with “Hitman: Codename 47” in 2000. Of course, the gaming character was inspired by the movies, specifically Luc Besson’s sleek and empty-headed assassin movies “La Femme Nikita” and “The Professional.” The game’s shaved-headed, sharply dressed, implacable hero seems to have, in turn, provided the basis for Mr. Besson’s subsequent “Transporter” movie franchise, featuring Jason Statham as a similarly coifed and clothed badass. By delivering the big-screen “Hitman” to the multiplex just in time for Thanksgiving, 20th Century Fox has created a marketing turducken — an old film wrapped in a video game stuffed into a new film.

Conventional movie wisdom says that good books make for bad movies. The more literate, complex, and engaging a story is at the written word level, the reasoning goes, the less likely it is that those qualities will survive a filmic adaptation. Since “Hitman” sprang from source material without any literary substance of any kind, it should by rights be one of the greatest movies ever made. Sadly, it’s not. Instead, “Hitman” is another in a long line of dog-eared, simplistic, familiarly plotted, yet needlessly convoluted patchwork narratives meant to be followed in any language, screen size, or attention span.

A nefarious plan to replace a moderate Russian premier (Ulrich Thomsen) with a criminal double goes awry when the evil masterminds behind it foolishly choose to make a patsy of the titular assassin (eventually introduced as “47” and played by Timothy Olyphant), a man so expert in dealing death that if the Nobel prize were given for murder, he would be short-listed annually. The pastiche of latter-day action clichés and dull fight scenes this scenario spawns is regularly interrupted by increasingly desperate efforts to lend the film some sort of character gravitas, mostly via a backstory involving the shadow organization that gave Mr. Olyphant’s character the UPC tattoo that he and his homicidal kinsmen proudly display on the backs of their necks.

Also on hand are Nika (Olga Kurylenko), a Russian prostitute with a heart of pure platinum that 47 must protect; Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott), an intractable pursuer from Interpol who would bring our antihero to EU justice, and the usual assortment of rival killers, Russian soldiers, and innocent bystanders. Is it a meta-spoiler to say flat out that the film does not offer a single surprise?

The best that “Hitman” has to offer is Mr. Olyphant in the title role. Though hairless and clad in Paul Smith slim-fit couture in lieu of buckskins, Mr. Olyphant retains the level gaze and swallowed growl that helped make his Sheriff Bullock such a central tile in the downbeat frontier mosaic of HBO’s “Deadwood.” If only the script he interprets here had one-tenth the brains, heart, poetry, or teeth of your average “Deadwood” small-screen outing.

In classic cartoon animation circles, there exists the concept of “squash and stretch.” The idea is that a cartoon character possesses the illusion of life by remaining in constant motion between two different exaggerated kinetic extremes. Action sequences in the post-“Matrix” world bear their own variation of squash and stretch: exaggerated fast cuts and physical moves that condense the action with equally exaggerated slow-motion and balletic time-tampering effects that elongate gunfights and punch-ups into their own time zone. In the myriad violent set pieces in “Hitman,” director Xavier Gens appears to be motion-blind and tempo-deaf. Images freeze, multiple angles blaze by in rapid-fire cuts, muzzles flash, windows shatter, and bodies whirl, leap, and dive — but nothing really moves forward except the film’s running time. At the thrill-ride level and the dramatic level, “Hitman” is all stretch and no squash.