The Hitman's Bodyguard

The mismatched buddy movie hasn’t evolved much since Walter Hill created its modern archetype with 48 Hrs, his 1982 thriller where racial electricity crackled between Eddie Murphy’s fast-talking criminal and Nick Nolte’s knuckle-dragging cop. Watching Hitman’s Bodyguard – Patrick Hughes’ charmless Midnight Run knockoff – it might actually have regressed. The cinematography is certainly less handsome and the action less graceful: Jules O’Laughlin’s cheap digital lensing looks like we’re watching The Apprentice projected to the size of a double-decker bus while Hughes’ endless car chases and gun battles feel like Bond movie b-roll.

Casting is at a least promising. The tightly wound half of the odd couple is Ryan Reynolds’ Michael Bryce, a fastidious bodyguard who’s fallen on hard times after a polyamorous drug lord was assassinated on his watch. The louche one is Samuel L Jackson’s Darius Kincaid, a twinkly-eyed hitman with a reckless attitude to his own personal safety. In typical buddy movie fashion, they’re thrown together when Kincaid requires a chaperone while travelling from Coventry to The Hague to give evidence against a Belarusian war criminal (played by a clearly bored Gary Oldman) – Bryce's job is to ensure he doesn't get killed en route.

Reynolds and Jackson’s cross-country bromance might have raised a smile if only writer Tom O’Connor had bothered to give their characters something remotely funny to say on the journey. “My job is to keep you out of harm’s way,” an exacerbated Bryce screams at his charge. “I am harm’s way,” comes Kincaid's reply. That’s as zesty as the banter gets. Jackson at least has his ability to spice up dialogue with his spectacularly nuanced readings of the word “motherfucker” (which appears in every other line), but poor Reynolds is left floundering without his Deadpool-esque zingers.

What turns this derivative actioner from B movie to bad movie is its cheek to throw a moral debate into the idiotic mix. “Is it worse to kill bad guys than protect them?” muses Kincaid mid-way through the movie. This philosophical quandary might have carried more weight if dozens of dead, faceless corpses didn’t lie in their wake. A brutal punch up that shifts from a cramped kitchen to a hazardous hardware store is the one bright spot in the action because the violence for the first time has consequences – we feel every sizzle of skin on the grill and jolt of pain as a nailgun lets fly. The rest of the film plays like a videogame on easy mode as our trained killers slice through Oldman’s army of assassins. A few laughs would have made Hitman’s Bodyguard bearable, but some more danger wouldn’t have gone amiss.

---

Released 17 Aug by Lionsgate