Then again, if the interactions between the hitman and his bodyguard were more clever or interesting, this wouldn’t matter so much. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds in The Hitman’s Bodyguard Lionsgate Even Bond girls get to do more these days than just wait around. But why write a character as terrific as Hayek’s and then trap her in a cell without breathing room for nearly all of the film? The Hitman’s Bodyguard feels a bit like a step back into the past, when “love interests” existed purely to advance a movie’s plot instead of being three-dimensional characters of their own.
This is a movie about a hitman and a bodyguard, not their love lives. Those flashbacks, though, have the unfortunate effect of reminding us how little Yung and Hayek have to do in this movie Hayek especially, in a whirling dervish of a role, is a far too minor character locked up in a jail cell and only interesting for how she drives forward Kincaid’s plot.Īnd, I mean, fine.
Unfortunately, the film’s chattier scenes are undeniably its weak points, though they incorporate flashbacks - to the moments when the two men met their romantic interests - that zip and zing with passion. The action mostly works in The Hitman’s Bodyguard, but any bromance requires some soul-baring. The Hitman’s Bodyguard doesn’t deliver on any of its promises And as Kincaid and Bryce lurch ludicrously and painfully toward their ultimate goal - the courtroom - they encounter more and more opponents who are out, quite literally, for blood. The requisite hitman movie philosophical discourses on guilt and innocence (are you worse if you protect bad guys or kill them?) are mixed with ruminations on life and love. The rest of the film is a mix of road trip soliloquies, epic chase scenes, and bloody combat sequences. But he’s especially mad because the Interpol agent who brought him onto the mission, Amelia Roussel ( Elodie Yung), is responsible (or so he believes) for his downgrade years earlier from a “Triple-A” protection agent to his present modest circumstances. The fastidious Bryce is less than enthusiastic about his new charge, who keeps escaping his grasp like a greased piglet. Kincaid may be a stone-cold killer, but he is all heat and passion when it comes to Sonia.
Jackson in The Hitman’s Bodyguard Lionsgate
Michael Bryce (Reynolds) is an “executive protection agent” hired by Interpol to retrieve and protect Darius Kincaid (Jackson), a hitman with whom Interpol has struck a deal: testify against Dukovich, and they’ll free his wife Sonia ( Salma Hayek) from a Dutch prison.
I don’t know about you, but I am not really up for the whole cruel-murderous-leader-with-a-vaguely-Russian-accent trope right now, though the protestors outside the court look vaguely familiar, with one holding up a sign that reads “I am too young to be this mad.”
Part of The Hitman’s Bodyguard problem may simply be its framing device: the trial of the tyrannical former Belarusian president Vladislav Dukovich ( Gary Oldman), who’s being tried in the International Criminal Court for war crimes and atrocities. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds in The Hitman’s Bodyguard Lionsgate The Hitman’s Bodyguard has a predictable plot that never quite comes together Jackson and especially Reynolds are funny and kinetic as action heroes, but when it gets down to the business of the bromance - which the film clearly wants to play up - it veers off into a snorefest, with their respective other romances seemingly bolted onto the plot to make them more interesting. And in The Hitman’s Bodyguard, that never materializes. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-markīut what any romance requires is some chemistry between the leads.