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The comic book makes that transformation over the course of a brutally detailed action sequence that runs roughly from page 13 -21 of the first issue. The corresponding scene in the film takes-up roughly a minute and a half of screen time, looking fluid if not stylish as it does so. Rather than merely letting things coolly snap into place for Moses, the film decides that an efficient, three-man hit squad that can act covertly is not enough. This hit is handled by a group twice as big that would act without any care at all for the kind of commotion that would tend to cause in the nice, suburban neighborhood Moses lives in. It’s unrealistic and appallingly stupid. The film doesn’t execute the scene with any love of the overblown Hollywood action the script seems to be looking for.

The first issue is more or less covered in the first 11 minutes of the film without any respect for the darker end of the story. Thus, this portion of the movie comes as kind of a disjointed action sequence with a bit of awkward, interpersonal romantic drama as an introduction.

To be fair to the film, the action is competently paced in a format that feels very clean and kinetic. A faithful adaptation of the original story in this manner would only be onscreen for a little over a half an hour. Naturally, there’s going to be some desire to expand on things, as we discover when Moses confronts the girl at the office he’s been talking to. How the two different works handle the scene says a lot about the type of stories each end up becoming. In the comic book, Moses spills his guts about his past as a field agent with the CIA. He’s very businesslike, conducting himself in a very professional manner. In the film, the office girl comes home to find him already there. She’s alarmed, swinging a candlestick at him and generally being very hostile - rightfully so. There’s quite a bit of humor in the scene as it plays out between Bruce Willis and Mary-Louise Parker, but it’s not particularly dark. He lies to her to get her to leave the apartment, as people seem to be after Willis trying to kill him. The idiosyncratic, smooth, calculating killer who also tries his best to hold onto his sense of humanity is lost here. Moses in the film is more like a standard Bruce Willis action hero - fun to watch, but lacking in the kind of darkness that makes the character who he is.

When next we see Willis’s Moses, he’s driving. The office girl is in the back seat. There’s duct tape over her mouth. He’s evidently kidnapped her. This is more or less where the film completely veers off from the story it’s based on. It should be noted that this is only roughly 15 minutes into the film. We see a man talking on a phone conducting some sort of business over a phone conversation, presumably with a family member of his. He casually kills someone - framing it to look like suicide. We find out that his next hit is scheduled to be Moses - a former “analyst” for the CIA. Seeing that a vicious killer is after him, we clearly identify with the man on the run, even though he’s clearly just kidnapped a woman he seems to be lying to. Since this is a quirky Hollywood action film, it actually kind of works.

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