Despite seemingly perfect talent matched with a seemingly simple idea, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a needlessly complicated and mostly boring experience.
Late summer has become a surprise dumping ground of the Hollywood calendar for films that no one really wanted to make but were contractually obligated to. The Hitman’s Bodyguard is on par with the rest of this season’s mainstream offerings which have included a sequel to a film made about a doll that featured in a popular horror film for two minutes and a film about the secret life of text messaging icons.
Unlike those two examples, however, one thing that The Hitman’s Bodyguard does have going for it is good old fashioned star power. Ryan Reynolds has survived several radical transformations in mainstream comedy by remaining a charming, witty, presence and Samuel L. Jackson is, quite frankly, an actor who is worth his weight in gold or palladium or whatever the most valuable metal is these days.
I’m not sure if it’s actually possible for Jackson to phone in a performance. He’s the premier example of Stanislavski’s old maxim that there are no small parts, only small actors; and Jackson is a big actor. But he is getting on in years and, while he accomplishes far more than most could at age 68, action movies are a young actor’s game. Past his prime he most certainly is not but Jackson’s appeal has never stemmed from feeling like he’s indestructible.
That’s one of the film’s biggest flaws. Its pervading inconsistency. It is, fundamentally, a character driven feature but its leads are cartoons trapped within a mundane universe (several of the film’s action sequences take place in Coventry) so there’s never any real tension. The action is too grounded for a pair of characters whom you never, at any point, believe can die or even really be hurt that badly.
Reynolds himself is even an odd choice for the material. He’s never really been much for fight choreography and most of his action sequences revolve around close quarters hand-to-hand, which he does fine with but such scenes are usually given to action leads who are too old to run. Speaking of which, most of the film’s big stunts are carried out by doubles. A fact made painfully obvious by Jackson’s unwillingness to do any cardio on this film.
It’s not a condemnation of the man (again, he is 68 years old) but it’s a little jarring to so clearly notice how his character is shackled at the feet during his introduction, meaning he can do no more than shuffle, and as soon as he’s freed he is immediately shot in the leg. None of which would be so bad if his stunt double didn’t go on to perform several Bourne-esque death-defying leaps. Nothing really quite syncs up in The Hitman’s Bodyguard.
Rumour has it that Tom O’Connor’s 2011 Blacklist script was originally a drama that was hastily re-written into a comedy over several weeks prior to filming. It was in a minor development hell for some time before landing in director Patrick Hughes’ lap and it’s hard to imagine what had to have happened to the script for it turn from Blacklist material into the finished, straight-to-DVD, banality that it ends up as on screen.
The set-up seems good as gold on paper. Reynolds’ down-on-his-luck bodyguard must protect Jackson’s assassin despite the two having a professional history on opposite ends of a gun. Their combined timing and charisma being all you would need to carry the film. Yet we are still treated to a grindingly irritating romance subplot with an ex-girlfriend attached to the overarching case which Jackson’s character must testify in against Gary Oldman’s Belarusian dictator.
It goes without saying that Oldman is completely wasted in a role so thin it wouldn’t even stand up in an Expendables film (Hughes directed the third which is, to provide some kind of a frame of reference, a far superior film) but at the very least Salma Hayek is a ray of light throughout The Hitman’s Bodyguard despite being paired with not much else more than comedically excessive swearing and fart jokes.
For something that is being sold to you as a comedy, The Hitman’s Bodyguard spends an inordinate amount of time on moral equivalence and stock-villain subplots padding out the runtime. There is very probably an enjoyable 80 minute road movie trapped somewhere inside its nearly two hour running time and it’s sad to see how so many people missed the obvious truth that Reynolds and Jackson being themselves was all this film needed to rely on.
The Hitman’s Bodyguard is out now in cinemas.
