The Hitman's Bodyguard

I like movies like this a lot, and there hasn't been a classic action buddy comedy in a long time (no, The Nice Guys is not a classic action buddy comedy), so I was quite excited. And left the theater pretty disappointed. The Hitman’s Bodyguard always manages to score a few points on something, but after a while it trips over its own feet. Patrick Hughes does come up with and shoot some good action scenes, and a couple of them are excellent, but all of them are accompanied by completely inappropriate and ultimately annoying music. Samuel L. Jackson enjoys his role exactly as one would expect, but, unfortunately, Ryan Reynolds is usually next to him playing a depressed, boring and annoying buffoon. For a while it seems like an easygoing and funny film, only to switch at some points into a rather depressing and unnecessarily serious one. Well, the result is a mess that sometimes goes excellently, sometimes terribly and mostly kind of mediocre. After its clever and successful marketing, I expected a lot more. (21/08/2017)

I can't even remember when I've enjoyed four stars this much. Admittedly the buddy element doesn't really work there, as Reynolds can't keep an eye on Jackson, who clearly could do whatever he wanted here, even with a crane, and it has a terrible selection and use of music, but where it does dominate is in the field of unapologetic action, which is plentiful in the film and great to watch. The problem with most action comedies is that they have directors forged in the comedy genre rather than the action genre, and they have to work with actors who are a lot of laughs, but getting them to kick a jacked-up hundred-pound stuntman in a way that doesn't demand suspension of disbelief just isn't possible most of the time. Fortunately, Hughes is first and foremost an action director who has experience with explosive choreography, so I can fully enjoy all the stunts, chases, and shootouts, the live streets in broad daylight, and they're multi-layered to boot. The tour de force escalation is then the chase in Amsterdam, with five elements chasing each other (goons, police, interpol, bodyguard, and hitman) using boats, motorbikes, cars, machine guns, and bazookas, not one at a time but all at once. The streets are treacherous, full of dodging civilians, cars, outdoor restaurants and bridges, and everything is used to the maximum with first-class choreography. And at the end of the film, perhaps as if out of obligation, a helicopter still sort of casually falls on a building, just to say they did. Hughes has managed to make excellent use of every dollar of his $30 million budget, and though he still hasn’t quite come up with a new Lethal Weapon in hand, it suffices for one of the most entertaining films of 2017. (07/11/2017)

It hasn’t happened to me in a long time that after watching a movie I would feel that I just saw two different halves of an action comedy that were really different in terms of quality. My excitement over a new action comedy gradually faded as I was watching a story taking place in London that wasn’t too funny and in which the pair (Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds) couldn’t seem to manage to tune in to the proper buddy-comedy wavelength. It took a long time and for a moment I felt that I wouldn’t manage to watch it to the end. For instance, Selma Hayek is so incredibly unfunny in this one and she didn’t fit in her role so much that it was nothing but embarrassing. But about an hour into the movie, something incredible happened. The movie relocated to Amsterdam and it not only turned into a whirlwind of action, but it got pretty entertaining as well. Samuel and Ryan literally found one another and they started shooting catchphrases at each other. In the end, I was so excited about the second half that I had to watch several scenes again. How is it even possible that one film could create so many different emotions? (30/11/2017)

At times it grinds a lot in its blend of crazy buddy comedy with serious ideas and elements (Gary Oldman's villain is too one-dimensionally psychopathic for such a lightweight film), and the pacing is uneven depending on the attractiveness of each character, but the two title characters are so entertainingly sketched and their confrontations so well motivationally set, transformative, and embellished, with a supporting character (Hayek’s) that so perfectly embodies my idea of a badass femme fatale, and the action scenes so accurately combine adrenaline with hyperbole that I can't help but hum contentedly and recommend this action flick with an A-list cast; for Samuel's sake alone, who drops one firecracker after another and delivers his third best role after Pulp Fiction and The Hateful Eight. 70% (22/08/2017)

A romp full of the best lines from start to finish. Jackson is God and Reynolds in Deadpool mode (in fact this could be a prequel). Awesome action, locations atypical. And the last time I saw such a superb chase (boat, motorbike, car) was in Jackie Chan’s Armor of God. Fucking Prague! (28/01/2018)