Review: The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard

 

There are a lot of obvious ways a sequel to The Hitman's Bodyguard could have improved on the original and The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard ignores every single one of them. This is a sequel to a buddy comedy where the "buddy" part of the comedy was the only thing that even half worked, so what do they do? Slap a third character slap bang in the middle of things to make sure what little chemistry there was in the first film is nowhere to be found.

To be fair, that isn't entirely Salma Hayek's fault - her character Sonia (the wife of the title) might have been annoying in the first film, but at least there are long stretches where Hayek seems aware she's in a movie that requires her to give a performance. Samuel L Jackson as Darius Kincaid, super-cool hitman and, uh, that's about it? Is there a more dismissive term than "phoning it in"? Because that would definitely come in handy right about now.

Not that Ryan Reynolds is doing much better as bodyguard Michael Bryce. If Jackson's default "whatever" mode is acting so laid back it's a wonder he can stand up, Reynolds' is a kind of hyperactive whining that wears out its welcome two scenes in. Most of the remarkably limited reason to keep watching this is the extremely slim chance that meeting any of the various other big names in this film will shock Reynolds into delivering a decent performance. Spoiler alert: it doesn't happen.

This has the kind of story that's both overly complicated and extremely flippant, bringing everyone reluctantly together through a series of mix-ups (Bryce has retired and refuses to pick up a gun) and then giving them a mission to save Europe from Aristotle Papadopolous (Antonio Banderas). He wants to avenge Greece's financial humiliation at the hands of the EU by using a virus to turn everything connected to a computer into an explosive device, as you do.

There's a lot going on - double crosses, Morgan Freeman, a European crime agency that for some reason hired Frank Grillo, a thirty second cameo from Richard E Grant that doesn't even give his character a close-up - so you'd be forgiven for thinking something must come close to working at some stage. After all, this kind of dopey action romp doesn't really require much to get it over the line. Some minor charm, some ok stunts, a sense that those involved are having fun and you're done.

None of that is on offer here. Yes, the scattershot attempts at comedy do occasionally come close to being mildly amusing; it's totally possible that in another movie surrounded by other actors all three leads (who even here are charismatic performers) could have removed some of the fingernails-on-blackboards qualities from their characters. But on the whole this fails at pretty much everything you could possibly ask for, usually in ways that suggest nobody involved was really all that bothered in the first place. 

While most of this film's flaws were there in the first installment, it's still rare to see a sequel so aggressively discard the only element that made the original work. You've got Jackson and Reynolds right there on screen: why this doesn't give them more than a brief handful of moments together (and those come towards the end when the damage is done) is a mystery. 

Maybe those involved thought simply adding more of everything else would make this a better film - they certainly succeeded in adding more words to the title.

- Anthony Morris