2007). (Coastlines was first screened during the Sundance Film Festival in 2002 while Catch and Release was filmed in 2005.) He had bought a house in the weeks before Deadwoods cancellation and he later admitted his job choices during this period were for "purely financial reasons." In Live Free or Die Hard, he played a villainous cybersecurity expert. Both he and Bruce Willis have said his role was underwritten in the script, and he enjoyed working with Willis to develop the character. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone declared him "a master at smiling menace", while Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle found him "perfectly ice cold." However, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times remarked: "Mr. Olyphant has many charms, but annihilating menace is not one of them." He next starred in Hitman, a video game adaptation, as the assassin Agent 47. He was hired to replace Vin Diesel six weeks before filming began and reluctantly agreed to shave his head. The film was commercially successful, grossing over $100 million, but received negative reviews. Todd McCarthy of Variety described Olyphant as "an actor capable of portraying subtle ambiguities and thought, which suggests he ought to branch out to play something other than baddies." Nick Schager of Slant Magazine was disappointed to see the actor "reduced to glowering and posing with pistols" while Manohla Dargis of The New York Times felt he was "strangely, at times ridiculously, miscast." In 2008, he had a supporting role as a lieutenant colonel in the Iraq War drama Stop-Loss, played a pompous newscaster in the little-seen comedy Meet Bill, voiced the character Cowboy in the video game Turok and made a guest appearance on the first season of the ABC sitcom Samantha Who? with Christina Applegate. Olyphant had a new outlook when choosing his 2009 projects, influenced by his experience with Hitman: "It motivated me to take a little more responsibility with what I was doing ... I was very fond of the director and a lot of the people that worked on the film but there was definitely a part of me that was like, "What am I doing here?'" He starred as a morphine addict in the little-seen independent heist comedy High Life, with Derek Elley of Variety praising his "terrific" performance. He had a starring role in the thriller A Perfect Getaway as a possible serial killer of fellow holidaymakers in