The Hitman’s Bodyguard (Summit Entertainment, Millennium Films, Cristal Pictures, East Light Media, TIK Films, Lionsgate, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched the third Blu-Ray disc in the package I got from Amazon.com that also contained The Boy Next Door and the surprisingly good The Spy Who Dumped Me (both it and the title of the second Austin Powers movie, The Spy Who Shagged Me, were puns on the real-life Ian Fleming title for a James Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me). The third in the package was called The Hitman’s Bodyguard and was essentially an espionage movie that also used the Black-and-white buddy-buddy formula of the Lethal Weapon movies (and the 48 Hours movies that preceded it). The film, directed by Patrick Hughes from a script by Tom O’Connor, had a prestigious cast: Ryan Reynolds as the bodyguard, Michael Bryce; Samuel L. Jackson as the hitman, Darius Kincaid; Salma Hayek as Darius’s wife Sonia (who apparently was involved with Reynolds’ character until she thought he was dead, or something), and a small but showy part for Gary Oldman as Vladislav Dukhovich, former dictator of Belarus, who as the film begins is on trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands (you know, the International Criminal Court – the one the U.S. refuses to join because we don’t want ever to have any of our war criminals held accountable for anything) and Kincaid is the only person who has the crucial evidence the prosecution needs to convict him. There’s also a woman who works for Interpol – which is described in O’Connor’s script as honeycombed with agents for the bad guys and generally not to be trusted (which made it more ironic than usual that the don’t-pirate-this-movie logos at the end invoked Interpol – the real one – as the agency that would come and get us if we try) – who seems to be there to be Reynolds’ big squeeze even though she’s working for an agency he doesn’t trust. The actress playing this part looked enough like Salma Hayek I thought they were supposed to be the same person – which would have made the film even kinkier.

I nodded off a lot during this one mainly because it contained a lot of repetitive action sequences that got boring as they went on, set in the usual plethora of locations modern movies use because they think the more they travel around the world the more exciting they’ll be (note that the 1941 The Maltese Falcon, which would be my choice for the greatest crime film of all time, never leaves San Francisco except for one wild-goose side trip to a vacant lot in Burlingame, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo takes place just in San Francisco and Santa Cruz), and also I suspect because the more countries you film in, the more credits you can get to claim that a film was made there and therefore they should give you a tax break when you release it there. What I liked least about The Hitman’s Bodyguard is my old bugbear, uncertainty of tone; while the delight of The Spy Who Dumped Me was at least in part from the way director and co-writer Susanna Fogel and her writing partner David Isenson never left us in doubt that they intended the movie to be a spoof (which ironically made the big gravity-defying action scenes easier to take), Hughes and O’Connor seemed to be trying to have it both ways, having the characters exchange witticisms (though they weren’t anywhere near as witty as O’Connor clearly thought they were) and include some light-hearted moments, they expected us to take this all too seriously and staged the action scenes with a total lack of camp – at least of intentional camp. It’s the sort of film that just drones on and on and on – the kind you can sleep through much of without the sense that you’re missing much – you can nod off with Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson being chased for their lives through one European city and when you wake up they’re still being chased for their lives, only in a different European city. And one thing I found amusing about this movie is that there were so many action scenes in so many urban locations, the final credits listed no fewer than 43 people whose role was to direct traffic away from where they were shooting.

In the end Our Heroes (or should that be Our Anti-Heroes?) finally end up in The Hague (ya remember The Hague?) where they’re racing against time to get Darius Kincaid to the International Criminal Court (ya remember the International Criminal Court?) in time to testify against the Belarussian dictator Vladislav Dukhiovich (ya remember Vladislav Dukhovich?) and Hughes gives us a genuinely exciting suspense sequence in which they make it to the Court with literally seconds to spare before the case is dismissed. Only Dukhovich had another trick up his sleeve: he had his cadre drive a truck bomb just outside the Court building to blow it up after making a speech in which he declares that as a sovereign head of state, the International Criminal Court had no jurisdiction over him (I suspect writer O’Connor had in mind the Court’s trial of former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, only in that case he escaped justice because the trial droned on so long he died of natural causes in the middle of it), and in the chaos after the explosion Dukhovich makes it to the roof of the building, where a helicopter is supposed to pick him up and fly him to safety, only Kincaid shoots down the copter and then pushes Dukhovich to his death off the roof of the building. One nice thing about O’Connor’s script is that I suspect a lot of the character’s names are in-jokes: in the film’s opening set-up scene our hapless bodyguard Michael Bryce thinks he’s successfully protected a Japanese businessman named Kurosawa (after legendary Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa?), only just as Bryce is getting him onto his private plane Kincaid picks him off with a sniper rifle, which gets Bryce demoted. Later in the movie there’s a professor named Asimov (Rod Hallett) along with his wife (Nadia Konakchieva) and their son Petr (Valentin Stojanov).

There’s also some good use of music, including Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” used as background for an action sequence (though in that case the soundtrack was if anything too distracting) and songs by Lionel Richie (whom I ordinarily can’t stand but whose music fit the context), Bobby “Blue” Bland, Memphis Slim with Willie Dixon and a couple of blues numbers by Samuel L. Jackson himself – including one that sounds like an old blues record except for the repeated uses of “fuck” and “shit” in the lyrics, which gets even funnier when Jackson’s backup singers echo them. Jackson has a good enough singing voice it might actually be entertaining to hear him do an album – or to see him make a musical. But overall The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a virtual compendium of what’s wrong with contemporary action movies, with preposterous sequences that shatter the laws of physics and all too little explanation of who these people are and why they want to kill each other. Amazingly, this movie did well enough at the box office to generate a sequel, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, which quite frankly I am highly unlikely to see.