The Absolute Unhinged Downhill Rollercoaster That Is The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard
Spoilers for this movie. Complete and total spoilers. Literally the entire plot.
Listen. I like dumb things. We all like dumb things. We need dumb things. Especially in a year like this one, with all the horrible things going on in the real life world, I really don’t need to watch some high-minded intensely dramatic tear-jerker. I am actively seeking out dumb, easy, fare. However. However. This… thing, which I hesitate to even call a movie, is one of the most nonsensical low-effort stupid things I have seen in years, and I can’t even decide if I loved it or hated it. I just… experienced it.
The first movie, The Hitman’s Bodyguard, was also dumb. It was dumb, funny, loud action. But it was simple. Do I remember most of the movie? No, obviously not. I do remember the basic plot, though: Ryan Reynolds, disgraced bodyguard, is hired to protect and transport Samuel L. Jackson, notorious hitman, to some sort of international court where Gary Oldman of some eastern European country stands trial for crimes against humanity and Sam Jackson is the star witness. Also at one point Sam Jackson sings “Bevilo Tutto” with a prayer van full of nuns. That’s about all I remember, but a movie like that isn’t really about the plot. It’s about the enemies-to-friends, the laughs, and the action. It doesn’t try to have a strong or intricate plot because it wants us to focus on the fun. And it worked! I enjoyed it. It was stupid, and I laughed. Job done.
The sequel that just came out, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, falls into the classic hole of a sequel trying to be bigger, in every way, to its predecessor. The wife in question here is Salma Hayek, who was briefly in the first one, as a sort of goal for Sam Jackson to work towards (getting back to her). The sequel, then, upgrades the main duo to a trio, and there are three different contentious dynamics at play. Salma Hayek is mad at Sam Jackson for dipping on their honeymoon and really likes to infantilize Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Reynolds thinks they’re both insane (his words) and would be terrible parents, Sam Jackson frenemy-hates Ryan Reynolds and is trying to keep Salma Hayek happy. There are also about 87 new secondary characters that receive practically no introduction or explanation.
Now, I will admit I saw this movie once (a few hours ago) and didn’t take notes, but I dare you to watch this movie and immediately after you exit the theater tell me what happened in the first five minutes. Tell me what the Scottish translator’s name was. I dare you.
Anyways, I’m gonna make an attempt here. The problem is, as you must’ve guessed by this title, this movie is utterly incomprehensible and most of it does not make a single lick of sense. So the movie starts with Ryan Reynolds in therapy, and his awful therapist tells him to stop bodyguarding and go on vacation in Italy. While on “sabbatical,” Salma Hayek finds him and tells him that Sam Jackson has been taken by the mafia, and they need to go find him. At the same time, Antonio Banderas (playing a Greek man named Aristotle Papadopolous, with absolutely zero effort made to change his accent) is angry because the European Union wants to impose sanctions on Greece. So he decides to… “destroy” Europe. Somehow. It’s unclear. It involves a giant deep-sea drill made of diamond. After a test run of the whatever, which somehow explodes an entire neighborhood, Interpol agent Frank Grillo is convinced there’s some sinister shit going on, while the entire EU somehow believes this was caused by a lightning strike. He’s also from Boston, which is very important to him. EU leader something-or-other tells him he can have 24 hours to solve this case, and he’s like… ok I need a translator. I’m genuinely straining to remember the sequence of events here.
The trio is taken by Frank Grillo, who somehow knows exactly what’s going on with Antonio Banderas, and he conscripts them into meeting with some middleman that his now dead informant was supposed to meet. They do so, but it turns out that the EU has sent a different task force to that same meeting, which they also somehow know about, and Frank Grillo can’t warn them in time. The middleman straps a bomb bracelet to Salma Hayek and a bar fight ensues when they get made. They escape, and end up going to Ryan Reynold’s father’s house in Tuscany to try to get the bomb off Salma Hayek. His father is Morgan Freeman, who is also the world’s greatest bodyguard or something. They get sent to a safehouse, where they get kidnapped again, this time by Antonio Banderas. Twist, turns out Morgan Freeman works for him and sold his son out cause he also hates him but didn’t reveal it for the first 30–40 years of his life. Double twist, Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek used to be a thing, then she got amnesia when she fell off a boat. Triple twist, turns out she was playing him and never had amnesia, she was just running a long con. Ryan Reynolds and Sam Jackson escape and then decide to go back to get Salma Hayek, who Antonio Banderas has now discovered is a… triple? quadruple? agent. Three parallel shootouts on a single yacht happen, Ryan Reynolds kills his dad, Salma Hayek kills Antonio Banderas. They stop the… virus from being… deployed? Jump off the yacht just as it explodes. Frank Grillo gives them a yacht as a honeymoon present and Salma Hayek and Sam Jackson legally adopt Ryan Reynolds without him or Sam Jackson realizing it. Salma Hayek and Sam Jackson have very loud sex. The end.
The thing is, I just spent 500 or so words explaining the basics of the plot, but this an hour-and-forty-minute movie. This is not everything that happens. I also very much glossed over the parts of the plot that make no good goddamn sense, which is most of them. Who is Antonio Banderas, for one? We literally never find out. We assume he’s Greek, because of the name and the fact that he’s mad at Europe for being mean to Greece, but we know absolutely nothing about who he is, other than that he has a lot of money. Is he a politician? A writer? A film star? The CEO of the Bank of Greece? No one fucking knows.
Who is the European Union lady who appears to maybe be Frank Grillo’s boss, which would make her the Interpol lady? Why is Frank Grillo in Interpol if all he wants is to go back to Boston? What role does he have in Interpol, and how does he simultaneously have absolute authority to forgive Sam Jackson’s and Salma Hayek’s innumerable crimes, and yet no leeway to do his job other than being given 24 hours and a surveillance van? How in the suspension-of-disbelief does he know exactly when the virus attack is going to happen? Who was Carlo? The mafia? How did he know so much about Antonio Banderas’s plans? Who is Antonio Banderas?
The virus plotline is the place where I struggle the most with intentionality and exactly how much stupidity I’m willing to put up with. The rest of it, everything I just mentioned, I can mostly get on board with. It’s a dumb movie, it’s a decent runtime, I don’t need everything explained for me to have fun. Frankly, I even enjoyed the dick-out-no-pants move of Antonio Banderas putting zero effort into his performance, while Salma Hayek and Ryan Reynolds go batshit wild with theirs and Sam Jackson is just along for the ride. It’s fine. I’m fine with it.
But, honestly. Screenwriters. Whoever the director was. What in the heavenly fuck was the virus idea? I cannot tell if it was intentionally absurd and less believable than straight up science-fiction, or if these dudes just have no idea how anything works. This apparent random Greek man’s plan is to… physically (diamond drill) break into the… European energy grid? Which is a small thing at the bottom of an apparently shallow enough trench that the sunlight reaches it. So he wants to physically drill a hole in it, and then upload a virus through unclear methods. The drill is at the bottom of the sea, and Antonio Banderas plugs in a regular-ass USB key from the yacht, and the upload takes six minutes, so who knows how these people think electricity or computers work. There’s a manual override handle in the middle of what appears to be a server bank on the yacht, and the boat is triggered to explode when the manual override is pulled.
I also feel like I need to re-emphasize that they keep saying he’s going to destroy Europe, like, permanently, and that when they did their small test run earlier in the film, they exploded actual buildings and killed 75 people. I genuinely think whoever wrote this screenplay has no passing knowledge of how electricity works. There’s not a single attempt to even slightly explain any of this away in the movie, by the way. By my most generous benefit of the doubt, I’m assuming the virus is intended to somehow overload the power grid and cause malfunctions and blackouts. But, again, 75 people died. And not just that, but in an aerial establishing shot they show there are buildings that look like they were bombed, with parts of the roofs missing and all. I know people get hurt in blackouts, but this was instant explosions. I have genuinely no idea what they even thought they were doing, although it might be a bit bold of me to assume there was any thought that went into this script at all.
Honestly? I said earlier I don’t know if I enjoyed it or not, and I think my answer now is a strong “meh.” The main trio was fun enough, but I just spent way too much of the movie going “wait what did he just say? who’s that? what’s happening? how is he there? who’s still alive? where the fuck are they? what is happening??” for the frenemies dynamic to make it worth it. The villain was also incredibly lackluster. Like… he’s just a classics nerd who hates the European Union. There’s a million of those out there. If they weren’t going to put any effort into making the villains’ motivations or backstory make sense, they could’ve at least made him queer-coded. Sure, that would’ve added mild homophobia to their list of sins, but you don’t see anyone arguing that Disney movies didn’t use to be better when the villains were queer-coded. The first Bodyguard movie was dumb fun because it didn’t have a plot. Don’t try to have a plot if you’re not going to even slightly make an effort with it. Just don’t have a plot. We will all be better for it.
