[yasr_overall_rating]
The world’s top bodyguard gets a new client, a hit man who must testify at the International Court of Justice. They must put their differences aside and work together to make it to the trial on time.
It’s true.
There’s the upstanding, goody-goody white guy, Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds), who always has a plan and a backup plan and a backup plan for his backup plan. His shirts are starched, his tie perfectly knotted, and his job is to protect people from harm.
Then there’s the black guy.
Yep, he’s in prison.
Because he kills people for a living.
Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) wears fatigues and combat boots, he likes to “just roll” with his options (maybe that’s why he’s in prison), and he’s married to a hot-tempered Hispanic woman with a luscious ass…who’s also in prison because she got wrongly blamed for his shenanigans.
But Sonia (Salma Hayek) is not your sweet-Mamacita-making-tortillas type. She is equally capable of severing the axillary vein under your arm with a busted-up beer bottle as she is in cursing you out in two languages at once while looking undeniably sexy doing either. And this is, of course, the primary reason why Kincaid fell in love with her.
So far so good?
Trust me, it gets better.
Bryce’s career tanks when one of his clients is impossibly killed at the very last minute before safely according to an impeccable plan. Suddenly, straight-As white guy loses his “triple-A rating” and is now (2 years later) scrounging for clients among hopped-up-on-cocaine attorneys with death threats. What is more, Bryce, who is a nimwit about love and life in general, blames his hot European girlfriend (Elodie Yung) for the mishap and she eventually leaves him.
The story doesn’t explain why, but evidently, Kincaid’s career is also in the toilet, judging from the whole jail cell point of view.
Meanwhile, there’s an evil, evil Eastern European dictator on trial for all of his atrocities…except that there is seemingly no evidence and all the witnesses keep disappearing. Somehow, Kincaid is the guy with the evidence and the easy assumption is because he’s a former hired gun and he probably did a LOT of jobs for this evil man-with-an-evil-sounding-name, Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary Oldman).
So we’ve got the setup: white guy doing white guy things, black guy doing black guy things, evil dictator doing evil dictator things.
But now the killer needs protecting so that the evil dictator can be rightfully convicted and the greater justice to all Europeans can be served. This is why Bryce is called in, to escort Kincaid safely to the hearing.
Oh, and obviously they hate each other.
So much so that they immediately brawl upon meeting each other face-to-face, but eventually settle down to nagging and arguing and eventually liking each other, although both refuse to ever admit any such thing.
BUT!…if you load all of this with enough humor making fun of both cultures, pack every scene with fantastical stunt driving and explosions, miraculously keep the two main guys from getting killed while dodging a barrage of bullets, spatter enough blood to shock even the unshockable, you’ll have a grand slam American classic for action movie fans…you know, along the same lines as “Lethal Weapon” (1987) and “Nothing to Lose” (1997).
Additionally, they add the teeny, totally unexpected philosophical play on your emotions by presenting the argument of the good-guy hitman and the bad-guy bodyguard. Who is actually worse than the other when you never really know who your client is? And besides, Kincaid, ever motivated by love and romance helps Bryce face his cluelessness and get his girlfriend back. So, you see, the killer is really just a teddy bear and the goody-two-shoes has two left feet when it comes to love. It’s all an uproarious twist to the stereotypes….except that it’s so stereotypical.
Ultimately, I laughed. A lot.
And so will you.
Reynolds’ comedic timing is adorably witty and Jackson is his usual bad-dude, call-it-like-it-is self. Plus, Salma Hayek’s ass is completely deserving of an Oscar nomination all by itself.
The crowds will absolutely love this movie, but there’s nothing thoughtful at all about the directing, the photography, the plot, the character development or the action. It is absolutely a film that relies heavily on the race card for its humor and crazy Hollywood stunt action for its storytelling. Maybe there’s a time to respect one another’s culture. But maybe there’s also a time to just laugh at how idiotic we all can be sometimes. “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” is best for laughing together at our differences.
In theaters Friday, August 18th
