There isn't the slightest trace of virtuosity here — or, for that matter, of competence —, whether in front of or behind the camera, except for what Anthony Hopkins brings from his own unlimited personal reserve.
Contrary to what one might believe, the title does not refer to Hopkins’s character, but to Anson Mount (The Virtuoso ends up coming across as a nickname the character is too dumb to realize is ironic), a professional assassin who offsets the laconic nature of his profession with an endless and soporific narration that sounds as if he were reading long passages from Murder for Dummies; even a hypothetical viewer who has never seen a Hitman Movie like this would find this excess of exposure overwhelming.
Perhaps the movie should be called The Theoretician, because all of Mount’s encyclopedic knowledge is of little use to him in practice, an area in which he proves to be rather inept. Consider a job which must be made to look like an accident; his approach is to cause a literal traffic accident, and hope for the best (or, from the victim’s point of view, the worst).
Considering this haphazard method, it’s no surprise that an unrelated third party becomes a bonus kill for Mount — although he is inexplicably upset by this turn of events. Why should this bother him? Killing is killing, and morally there is little or no difference between killing someone for money and killing them through negligence; I can only conclude that what bugs Mount is having killed someone for free.
In any case, Mount’s minor crisis of conscience prompts The Mentor (Hopkins) to tell him an autobiographical story about “following orders” and “obeying his superiors” as a young soldier in the army; it’s a clichéd speech, but Hopkins effortlessly elevates the material and makes it easily the best thing in the entire movie.
Then again, it takes but a fraction of Hopkins’s considerable talent to elevate this dumbass script above the abject mediocrity that is its natural state. Consider the crux of the plot: The Virtuoso gets a note from the Mentor concerning his latest assignment that offers no other info than a date and time (and the words “White Rivers” which could be the name of a person or a place; the answer, however, turns out to be something much more inane).
Mount arrives on the scene confused as to who the target is, which results in the death of two or three people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; this not only goes against everything — and its a lot — he has told us about “precision” and “perfection”, but it also makes him look like a hypocrite, since this time the "collateral damage" does not faze him in the least.
Moreover, Mount never for a second finds all these unnecessary complications suspicious, nor does it ever occur to him that if someone really wanted someone else dead, they wouldn’t make a riddle about the whole thing.
