Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson can’t save The Hitman’s Bodyguard

IT HAD all the right ingredients for a fun action-comedy, like its megastars Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson. And yet...

THE first hint that The Hitman’s Bodyguard is going to require some suspend-your-disbelief happens within minutes.

Triple A-rated personal protection agent Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) is escorting a Japanese arms dealer from London to the airport. Everything goes smoothly until the client is shot dead as he looks out the window of his private plane.

It’s not even the unlikelihood of that scenario which elicits a mega-eyeroll. It’s that we’re led to believe that somehow there was no traffic through the streets of central London. If you’ve ever been to London, you know that is just not possible.

Of course, that’s the least of The Hitman’s Bodyguard’s problems.

On the surface, it has all the right ingredients for a decent and fun action comedy. Charismatic movie stars in the form of Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek and Gary Oldman. An outlandish premise that could be spun by the right hands into a jaunty adventure between two odd bedfellows.

What you get is a generic and thoroughly silly mess with eons of plot-holes that tries your patience in the worst way.

Not even its talented stars could save this mess. (Jack English/Lionsgate via AP)

Time jump two years after Bryce’s failed client extraction and he’s a one-man operation without the Triple A status. We know his life has taken a wrong turn because he now has, shock horror, four-day-old beard growth.

When Interpol’s plan to transport notorious assassin Darius Kincaid (Jackson) from Manchester to The Hague to testify against former dictator Vladislav Dukhovic goes awry, Bryce is recruited to deliver the human package.

Dukhovic’s men are super keen to kill Kincaid before he can get there and there’s a leak inside Interpol so no one can be trusted. And, of course, Kincaid and Bryce have a personal history of trying to kill each other so it’s a jumble of obstacles.

Reynolds and Jackson have good screen chemistry as two characters with very different approaches — Bryce is the planner while Kincaid prefers it loose. The two leads do their best to outperform the mediocre writing, but you can only watch them out-smart-arse each other for so long before it becomes one-note.

The Hollywood romance age gap never closes. (Jack English/Lionsgate via AP)

Hayek is a delightfully volatile bomb when she appears but gets too little screen time (and in classic Hollywood love pairings, is 18 years younger than Jackson). But Oldman’s villain is so arch, he has even less nuance than a bad guy on The Blacklist or some other TV crime procedural. Ugh.

The only thrills to be had are the movie’s fairly propulsive action sequences, especially the car/boat/motorcycle chase scenes through Amsterdam and a seemingly one-take hand-to-hand combat scene between Reynolds and a henchman. This film could actually serve as a decent tourism ad for Amsterdam if it wasn’t really an ad for the Ford Focus.

Its tone is confusing, unsuccessfully oscillating between funny ha-ha and the dark actions of a brutal dictator. Perhaps it’s because The Hitman’s Bodyguard screenplay was originally written as a drama before it was workshopped into a comedy, and consistency was clearly lost in the shift.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard was never going to be Oscar material but it had the potential to be a surprisingly fun, inoffensive action comedy, a la Central Intelligence.

Instead, it wasted its talented stars and served up a slop that is best watched on a long-haul flight, sandwiched between some non-Pixar animation and a weepy romance with a dying female lead.

Rating: 2/5

The Hitman’s Bodyguard is in cinemas from today.

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