You can finally get your chance to kill Sean Bean. The actor famous for his inability to survive to the end credits of most film and television appearances is now the first elusive target of Hitman 2. From Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones, Bean’s mortality has made him something of an internet legend, and IO Interactive have taken that on board for his Hitman 2 appearance. The opportunity to count yourself among the many others that have already killed him is littered with references to his other work, and his countless deaths.
Elusive targets are timed events in the Hitman series. You’ve only got a couple of days to log in and attempt the mission and you only get one try. These targets are unique and can’t be found in the levels normally and change up guard routines and security measures. Their impermanent nature also makes the perfect stage to poke a little fun at the often not living legend that is Sean Bean.
Agent 47 Has His Work Cut Out for Him
The entire mission plays off Bean’s deadly reputation, and it is all the more fun for it. His elusive target is called Mark Faba, also known as the Undying, a former British intelligence officer now operating as a freelance assassin and rival of Agent 47’s prodigious ICA employer. One might think that his moniker is in stark contrast to Bean’s lineage, but it comes from the fact that 12 previous ICA hitmen have killed Faba in the past, albeit unsuccessfully.
If players infiltrate the planning meeting Faba is in, he will ask the disguised assassin just how they would kill him. This is a possible tutorial into how the player could eliminate Faba, but works well to play on Bean’s terminal career. The first response is to poison his coffee and drown him in the toilet when he becomes sick. Faba states he’s survived worse than that, which is probably true, as Bean’s deaths are normally more dramatic than a few bubbles and some squirming.
Your second response is to throw him from the balcony. Faba doesn’t seem to bothered by this, simply remarking that there are bushes at the bottom to break his fall, and that he would walk away without a broken bone. But when you’ve been dropped from a gigantic antenna cradle to the cold hard metallic floor below in Golden Eye and been thrown from a rocky cliff by angry cows in The Field, you’re probably not going to be too scared of falling a couple of floors onto a cushioned bottom.
The third option is the gleaming kitchen knife left temptingly on the conference room table. Faba seems to like the idea, which isn’t surprising when Bean has more stab wounds than birthdays. This includes the time he was actually stabbed in real life during a bar fight.
It’s Just a Flesh Wound
But by listening in to Faba’s many conversations, we learn his preferred style of assassination is theatrical, outrageous and often times explosive. It’s an obvious reference to his numerous on-screen demises. Bean and his prolifically unlucky roles have among included being ripped apart by horses, decapitated, dropped from great heights, shot, stabbed, hung, and impaled.
Rarely though, has Bean been shuffled off this mortal coil by explosives, which is a prominent feature of this elusive target. Testing a specialized explosive compound, Faba proposes several fiery exploits, including using it as paint, and as an explosive pen. If players successfully complete the elusive target mission and kill the Undying Mark Faba, they are rewarded with an explosive pen to use in future deadly endeavors. If the pen sounds familiar, it might be because James Bond uses one in Goldeneye. While it doesn’t kill Bean’s character, it essentially leads to his death.
But some of Mark Faba’s references to Bean’s career can be a little more subtle, like when Faba explores the lab and comes across a prototype robotic soldier. Naturally this solider is another tool Agent 47 can use to kill him, but the way Faba talks about it seems to reference another of his films. Faba believes that soldiers and killers that have no capacity to feel fear will never triumph over feeling humans. This is one of the central themes of the film Equilibrium, where a literal unfeeling fascist state struggles to suppress a growing emotional rebellion. Errol, Bean’s character in Equilibrium, shares a similar sentiment to Faba.
And there might be other references that I missed because I am merely a Sean Bean fan and not a Sean Bean scholar. From lines about exploding fire extinguishers to rearranging “Mark Faba” into “Karma fab” or “Farm baak,” there is a lot that the most dedicated fans might uncover one day, if they have the chance. But even if you’re only loosely aware of Bean’s deadly reputation, the Undying elusive mission is a love letter to his work across the decades to bring us the most unsurprising death scenes.
The elusive target is available until the end of the month for everyone that owns Hitman 2. Just be careful discussing it on social media, as there have been reports of accounts getting blocked for openly declaring their intention to kill Sean Bean. Just feel the need to kill him in the game and in the game only for the limited time you get to do so.
