The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017)

When I started to see the reviews trickle in for The Hitman’s Bodyguard, I began to worry. Was this yet another case of all the good moments finding their way into the trailer, leaving the movie an emptier experience? The good news is that the exact opposite is true – most of the funniest lines in this action comedy were not spoiled by the advertising (largely on the basis of Samuel L. Jackson’s perennially creative love affair with a certain four-letter word). That’s not, however, to say that The Hitman’s Bodyguard is as successful as it ought to be, but it is diverting enough.

Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) is a down-on-his-luck personal protection agent scraping the bottom of the barrel until a call from Interpol agent Amelia Roussel (Elodie Yung), who just happens to be an ex-girlfriend. Agent Roussel asks Bryce to transport the boisterous hitman Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) to The Hague to testify against a war criminal (Gary Oldman) in exchange for a full pardon for Kincaid’s wife (Salma Hayek).

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is, in effect, a murderous Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with Samuel L. Jackson and explosions instead of John Candy and feel-good holiday cheer. And like its late-80s comedic predecessor, The Hitman’s Bodyguard sails on the strength of the chemistry between its two leads. Jackson is essentially playing one more facet of himself, a wisecracking, foul-mouthed badass with an infectious laugh and a violent temper. Ryan Reynolds does yeoman’s work as the straight man, but he’s a straight man with an edge, capable of playing deadpan punchlines like, “I hope they kill him, I really do.” Together, the two are comedy gold, and one senses that the best moments are the ones that developed through improvisation and riffing off each other’s strengths.

The moments that feel the most like the familiar Reynolds/Jackson personas are particularly strong because there are other parts of the film that feel overly scripted. The first act in particular feels like the most perfunctory beginning to a film since the on-the-nose opener for Ant-Man, though like Ant-Man the movie turns around rather effectively once the plot is permitted to progress. The first few scenes of The Hitman’s Bodyguard do the work of introducing the film and its characters, but in a way that baldly displays the mechanics behind the narrative. In the scene introducing Kincaid, for example, Interpol explains his motivation to him as he predicts how their plan will go awry; meanwhile, the villain is introduced while he murders a small child in cold blood.

Speaking of the villain, what was the size of Gary Oldman’s check and – given the brief screen-time allotted to him – was it worth it? From my perspective, Oldman is always worth the price of admission, but the film catastrophically underutilizes him. He’s entirely effective at creating a villain who is instantly loathsome, and in that sense you need an actor of Oldman’s caliber to make quick work of a thin character. It is, however, more than a little distracting to cast Oldman as a villain who spends most of his screen time as a silent defendant in court. Likewise, Salma Hayek is an odd choice for Kincaid’s wife, whose appearances on screen are largely limited to a prison cell and a flashback south of the border. One wonders if she was cast preemptively for a larger role in a potential sequel, because again these strike me as very expensive choices for comparably small roles.

Maybe I’m just getting old in my moviegoing years to be concerned about the budget for a film that otherwise entertained me. The Hitman’s Bodyguard is not as entirely as funny as I’d hoped it would be – at least in terms of quantity – but it did leave me with a good feeling and a few memorable one-liners which would be abjectly criminal to spoil. It has a few unsurprising but crunchy action sequences to pad out the funny bits, and if the plot had been a little less direct to allow more room for Reynolds and Jackson to bicker, it’d be an instant home run. The Hitman’s Bodyguard is good but not great, not a movie which demands to be seen theatrically but for which I am pretty glad to have done so.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is rated R for “strong violence and language throughout.” Direct by Patrick Hughes. Written by Tom O’Connor. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, Elodie Yung, and Salma Hayek.