Review: ‘Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard’ really misses the target
This image released by Lionsgate shows Ryan Reynolds, from left, Salma Hayek and Samuel L. Jackson in a scene from “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard.” (David Appleby/Lionsgate via AP)
Toward the end of “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” there’s a scene where Ryan Reynolds is repeatedly smashing a man’s head into a jukebox aboard a yacht, as sometimes happens. Each time the bloodied head goes in the machine, it triggers a new song. Until it lands on “The Sign” by Ace of Base.
“You’re lucky,” Reynolds says to his unconscious rival before walking away to commit more mayhem. “I love this song.”
That single scene beautifully captures the essence of the sequel to 2017’s “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” — overly violent, disarmingly cute and overly self-referencing.
Fans of the original will get the in-joke about “The Sign” but the sequel itself will not likely make new fans. It suffers from what many sophomore films fall prey to: Same basic idea, but just make it bigger.
So if the first’s plot was getting a witness to the Netherlands to testify about an European war criminal, the second is about saving the very existence of Europe itself. If the first had a star like Salma Hayek tucked in, the sequel is her elevation to co-star and the massive additions of Antonio Banderas and Morgan Freeman.
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Director Patrick Hughes returns for the overstuffed sequel but this time has trouble balancing the violence with the heart. Too many characters — a Boston Interpol agent and a rival bodyguard, among them — are blended into an unhinged 007-style plot with a tendency to veer uncomfortably personal.
Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson again play frenemies and their exchanges still crackle with electricity (and lots of potty language.) Reynolds is bodyguard Michael Bryce, a careful, safe professional (“Boring is always best,” is his motto) who has found himself on hard times. Jackson is Darius Kincaid, a shoot-first, reckless hitman.
If “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” was a bromance between these two, “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” is a threesome, thanks to the scene-stealing role of Kincaid’s wife, played with insane energy by Hayek. She’s as lethal and profane and impulsive as her husband. (“Your mouth needs an exorcism,” a shocked Bryce tells her). But the effect is that this talented trio are unbalanced and awkward; three is definitely a crowd.
If there was a stylish chic in the first film, it’s gone in the second, which sometimes seems cloying in its attempt to recreate the first. In addition to Ace of Base, returning this time are repeat references to: “Hello” by Lionel Richie, a gaggle of nuns, the deadly use of a penknife, a Richard E. Grant cameo, someone ejected from a car for not wearing a seatbelt and the leads getting kidnapped by having their heads put in a bag. “This feels familiar,” cracks Bryce. We know the feeling.
The plot puts Reynolds, Jackson and Hayek speeding across Italy to stop a madman from crippling Europe by destroying its electrical and data infrastructure, or something like that. The madman is played by Banderas who has forgone chewing the scenery in favor of swallowing whole chunks of it nosily while dressed like Liberace mated with “a set of curtains.” (Actual dialogue more colorful.)
For some reason the writers — Tom O’Connor and Phillip Murphy and Brandon Murphy — have added an amnesia twist, a digression into fertility, a weird drug trip on a mood stabilizer and an ill-conceived exploration of parenthood and family legacy. Plus, they wasted the skills of Freeman in a nebulous, confusing role, which is inexcusable.
The film is best when it winks at the viewer — Reynolds at one point gets into a vehicle and says “here’s the car chase” — or goes silly over-the-top, as when both our heroes and the villain kindly reference the 1987 Goldie Hawn film “Overboard,” which Banderas calls “a minor classic.” But no one — not even fans of the first film — will find this second one to be any sort of classic at all.
“The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” a Lionsgate release, is rated R for “strong bloody violence throughout, pervasive language and some sexual content.” Running time: 118 minutes. One star out of four.
Review: ‘Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard’ lacks visual thrill
In 2017, Lionsgate spat out an action-comedy called The Hitman’s Bodyguard, which you may or may not have seen but have likely forgotten either way. It coasted on the charisma of its leading men—Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson—and was an okay time at best. But it made more money than it cost, so a sequel lurches forth like a braindead zombie, oblivious to the fact that the world only wanted it when its face was fresh, original, and not adorned in rotting flesh. But what Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard presupposes is that you might want to see the zombie if it’s Salma Hayek.
Indeed, Hayek is the wife that’s been shoved into the sequel’s title. While she’s on honeymoon with notorious hitman Darius Kincaid (Jackson), Darius is kidnapped by the Mafia, prompting her to seek out the only man who’s had her husband’s back: bodyguard Michael Bryce (Reynolds). Bryce is on the verge of losing his bodyguarding license for associating with Darius, so he doesn’t want anything to do with the mission—but the fiery Sonia Kincaid doesn’t give him a choice.
Like the first movie, the plot is set into motion by a political conflict that gets dumber the more seriously it’s taken. This time around, a wealthy Greek terrorist wants to cripple Europe’s power grid as revenge for the European Union’s economic sanctions on Greece (a motive that would’ve been topical, say, nine years ago). The background events are, thankfully, sillier than those of the first film, which tried to have fun with a plot about genocide (a bit of a tonal clash there). Any notions that dire are dispelled by Antonio Banderas strutting around as a villain named Aristotle Papadopoulos, but Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard could’ve gone way sillier with its story, given how comedic the rest of the movie is. Listening to Interpol agents establish the stakes of the conflict is a waste of time. This is an irreverent buddy comedy, not Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
But yes, the level of seriousness has gone down a notch from the first movie, which tried to flip between “slaughter is tragic!” and “slaughter is hilarious!” at a moment’s notice. Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, conversely, is a wanton slaughterfest from minute one, and the murdering is taken much more lightly. No one is meant to be cared about here, not the hitman, his wife, nor their bodyguard, who are all separate incarnations of the same comic relief. Darius Kincaid: loud and abrasive, with a spoonful of Samuel L. Jackson’s vulgar shtick. Michael Bryce: loud and abrasive, with a spoonful of Ryan Reynolds’ vulgar shtick. Sonia Kincaid: loud and abrasive, but she spews vulgarities that (men imagine) women use. The new guy played by Frank Grillo is the same exact character but with an Interpol badge. If you’re a fan of shouting swears and sex words, everyone in this movie has you covered.
The sound mixing is just as loud and abrasive as the protagonists. It seems the sound engineering team was guided by one philosophy: if it’s violent, turn it up to 11. Punches land with roaring thuds; every gunshot is deafening. If you could survive at the center of an explosion, I imagine this is what the sensory overload would sound like. This makes the action scenes more obnoxious than entertaining—a problem made worse by the lack of visual thrill. More so than The Hitman’s Bodyguard, this is action comprised of shaky handheld footage and quick cuts. Guns fire, cut; blurry bodies spurt some fake blood, cut; do that again for practically every kill. Sometimes key action happens off-screen. Even the European settings aren’t as diverting: nothing here matches the picturesque chaos of the first movie’s boat chase through the canals of Amsterdam.
The best ideas are over as soon as they’ve begun. One action scene promises an interesting dynamic: Sonia has a bomb on her wrist that will explode if she’s away from a suitcase for more than fifteen seconds. But in the scene that follows, in which a group of armed criminals is trying to get their hands on the suitcase, the fifteen-seconds timer almost never starts counting down, and when it does, it’s resolved with barely any trouble. With the exception of a few visual gags, the action and comedy of Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard are coldly separate—you’ll laugh at the main trio’s antics; you’ll bide your time when the bullets are flying. Even when the antics and bullets are simultaneous, fights are treated as opportunities to crack wise rather than as set pieces of their own. Rarely does the action flaunt the violent creativity that better filmmakers wring out of action-comedy.
That’s not to say the movie’s never funny, though. You almost have to appreciate how enormously little it’s trying: it doesn’t take long for the plot to begin making zero sense, with characters showing up out of nowhere or turning out to be completely different people just to keep the story’s wheels spinning. But as with its attitude toward human life, the movie just doesn’t care. Its standards for itself are transparently low, and when you join it in that mindset, it can be a blast to sit back, down some popcorn, and listen to Salma Hayek unleash a string of profanities. It’s hard to find that anywhere but the movie theater. Unless you’re breaking and entering.
Review: Everybody deserves better than the dreadful sequel ‘The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard’
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Back in 2017, I reviewed Patrick Hughes’ noisy buddy action-comedy “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” and wrote, “this film should have traded the hitman’s bodyguard for his wife — she’s the most compelling character in it.” It seems they took my advice for the sequel, “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” and after watching it I realize how very, very wrong I was four years ago. I’m so sorry.
The outlandish Sonia Kincaid (Salma Hayek) is much more appealing in small doses, popping up as a bit of feminine comic relief, as she did in the first film. In the sequel, she is, of course, the wife of the hitman (Samuel L. Jackson), and indeed, with a bodyguard (Ryan Reynolds) in tow, though he’s not doing much guarding of bodies. It’s apparent quite quickly that Sonia in the lead is far too much Sonia. Then again, “too much” tends to be a trend with these movies.
Hughes, and screenwriters Tom O’Connor, Brandon Murphy and Phillip Murphy take a more-is-more approach to everything in “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”: more explosions, more gun battles, more boob jokes, more daddy issues, more reckless rampaging around Europe. At least they’ve brought this one in at a cool 99 minutes, after the first film pushed two punishing hours for absolutely no reason at all.
In this iteration, Reynold’s Michael Bryce, a sensitive soul, laments the loss of his Triple A bodyguard license after the events of the first film. At the behest of a therapist, he decamps to Capri to decompress, where he bumps into Sonia at a mass shooting, as you do. Sonia, who can only be described as sexily terrifying, slightly feral and aggressively maternal, has scooped Michael up at the request of her husband Darius. Except she misheard him, and soon the odd throuple are unhappily on the road in Italy, dodging bullets, per usual.
What overly complicated international incident have they gotten themselves into this time? It involves Antonio Banderas as a flamboyant Greek shipping magnate/terrorist, Aristotle Papadopolous, who is procuring diamond-tipped drills on the black market in order to access the data junction boxes that control Europe. When the junction boxes are infected with a virus, the electrical grid goes hooey, sowing chaos. He’s doing this as revenge for EU sanctions on Greece, or just for funsies. Who knows. Frank Grillo is also involved as an American Interpol agent from Boston (you can tell because of the “accent”) who enlists the terrible threesome of Darius, Sonia and Michael (or as Sonia calls him, “BREECE”), to intercept Aristotle.
Along the way, the trio learns to work together and to work out their own issues while engaging in many, loud shootouts and car chases through picturesque European cities. It’s the kind of action filmmaking that makes you wince and recoil, rather than gape in wonder, especially as Reynolds gets tossed around like a rag doll. It doesn’t help that Hayek, Jackson and Reynolds provide a steady stream of shrieking, swearing and smarm, respectively. But that’s what they’ve been hired to deliver, and all three are nothing less than professionals.
Some may enjoy the cacophonous, raunchy, lowest-common-denominator dreck that “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” has to offer. To those I say, Godspeed. But it’s undeniable that the actors, the audiences, and the filmmakers all deserve better.
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