In the end, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is just kind of there. Jackson is on the phone with Salma Hayek is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny, a sublimely incongruous bit of physical comedy that he sells with a charmingly smarmy look-but I’d also be lying if I said it were riotously funny. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a few moments when I chuckled-I won’t spoil exactly what he’s doing, but Ryan Reynolds’s pantomime in a bar while Samuel L. Who doesn’t love watching Salma Hayek play a curvy, tough-as-nails firecracker? Antonio Banderas doesn’t lean into the absurdity of his role quite as hard as he could, but that’s okay. I’ve always had a weakness for Ryan Reynolds and his peculiar brand of snarky charm and Samuel L.
#NETFLIX THE HITMANS BODYGUARD MOVIE#
With a movie like this the plot and the setup are all pretty incidental anyway: It’s an action-comedy with A-list stars, so the thing will either work or fail because the stars do or don’t have the chemistry to pull it off. (It will be interesting to see these weirdly dated subplots pop up in films shot before the pandemic over the next year or so, won’t it?) The title is a bit of a misnomer, really, since Ryan Reynolds is less of a “bodyguard” and more of a “one-man rescue team.” Yes, at one point he does have to play-act as Salma Hayek’s bodyguard in order to get the coordinates of European internet data hubs so she can get them to Antonio Banderas, who hopes to destroy the vital infrastructure of Europe as revenge for the EU’s disrespect of Greece. But she wants him to bodyguard! What’s Ryan Reynolds supposed to do? He’s supposed to have given up bodyguarding, at least for the time being. As the film opens, she takes the bodyguard away from a hard-earned, therapist-ordered sabbatical in order to help rescue her husband from the Mafia. As you can glean from the title, the hitman’s wife, Salma Hayek, is now in the mix.
![netflix the hitmans bodyguard netflix the hitmans bodyguard](https://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/hitman12.jpeg)
#NETFLIX THE HITMANS BODYGUARD SERIES#
I don’t think it matters too much with a movie series this, erm, high concept. Jackson, and ended up getting disbarred from the bodyguarding profession, at least temporarily, for aiding and abetting a known mass murderer and sworn enemy of the bodyguard guild. Now allow me to guess the plot of the last film, 2017’s The Hitman’s Bodyguard: Ryan Reynolds played a bodyguard for notorious hitman Samuel L. You can probably guess why I mention this at the top of my review of The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. I could gussy this up as a grand experiment in the vagaries of narrative or the nonlinear nature of our fractured cinematic landscape if I’m being totally honest, it’s because I don’t want to be bothered to see the predecessor for something I know I’ll have marginal use for anyway. Every once in a while, I like to see a sequel to a movie that I haven’t seen the first installment of in order to see how difficult it is to follow what’s happening.