The Hitman's Wife’s Bodyguard

Virus, The Angels Fell

The Hitman's Wife’s Bodyguard
2021 UK/USA
Directed by Patrick Hughes
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some small spoilers.

The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is, obviously, the sequel to The Hitman’s Bodyguard (which I reviewed here)... well now, hey, it’s better than giving it a 2 on the end. Now, I’d heard that this sequel is not as strong as the first film but, frankly, although there’s one slight issue I have with it, I think this second movie is far superior to the first and gets some things right which were thrown away as kind of a missed opportunity in the first.

Okay, so the plot is that a big bad guy played by Antonio Banderas is going around various countries in Europe, drilling into their electrical supply lines and then crippling their countries in a very explosive, Hollywood style over-the-top manner by injecting a computer virus into the various systems. None of it sounds that do-able in real life (in this fashion) but, well, it’s a movie plot set up so it works just fine. We’re in fantasy land here after all... as demonstrated by the amount of physical punishment that Ryan Reynolds takes in this movie, which would surely hospitalise a real person for months at the very least (he’s run over with a car at least twice).

Anyway, somehow Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman character gets kidnapped and mixed up with this whole scheme and it’s down to the always wonderful Salma Hayek, reprising her role as Jackson’s wife, to get him out. So she gets to the psychologically troubled (due to events in the last movie) Ryan Reynolds bodyguard character, forcing him out of his ‘new, stress free life’ because she misunderstands her husband’s request of who to get to help her get Jackson away from his captors. And, of course, in the process of this initial rescue, the three become ‘travelling companions’ as they get embroiled in the whole caper and tasked with saving the world from Banderas’ evil scheme.

And it’s a hoot. This one retains the wonderful, disagreeable chemistry between Reynolds and Jackson and then ramps it up by expanding Salma Hayek’s role from the first film to really add the craziness. Salma is on fire here and she’s easily the best thing about the movie, it has to be said... the three leads are all great and make a perfect team in this one.

And it’s a bit ‘business as usual’ for a Hollywood action film but the various gun battles, fist fights, car chases and stunts are all quite watchable and this one does the one thing the first film should have done more of. I remember complaining the first time around that Jackson and Reynolds were so good playing off one another but that, for some reason, they rarely shared any action sequences together... the writers always seemed to split them up and cross cut between two separate action sequences for each character. Here, I’m happy to say, we have none of that. All three leads... Reynolds, Jackson and Hayek... share a lot of screen time together and collaborate on all of the action scenes really well (and they’re all quite funny performances too... which helps anyway).

There’s perhaps an over reliance on a kind of visual punchline to many of the scenes, perhaps... where we, and usually the characters, perceive something to be happening and then the camera will pull back to reveal a different picture, such as the fact they've just been surrounded by a section of the secret service holding guns on them... or something will happen to just change the situation suddenly, like all three getting tranquiliser darts in the neck (of course, Reynolds gets about six shot in his face) but it’s not too distracting and it provides the required humour as intended so, I can’t complain too much about this stuff. Nor possibly on the use of ‘unexpected dream sequences’ being used in a similarly humorous way.

What I can complain about is that some of it isn’t all that funny in places and there is an over reliance on way too much swearing, perhaps but...yeah, a lot of comedy in general is hit and miss, to be honest but the joke to laugh ratio isn’t bad here and, frankly, one woman at the screening I was at was laughing hysterically throughout the whole movie so, I’m maybe a little humour-light myself, in all fairness.

Other than that, there’s a nice Steve McQueen reference and a silly but watchable guest role for Morgan Freeman as Ryan Reynold’s ‘ultimate bodyguard father’... but I don’t want to say too much about that character here, to be honest.

Ultimately, if you liked the first movie, then you should have a fair amount of fun with The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard... and Salma Hayek seems to be in so few things these days that it’s always good to see her in anything new, especially humorous roles (I always loved her as ‘the muse’ in Kevin Smith’s Dogma). I had a fairly good time with this one and, from the sound of the audience, everyone else had an even better time with it than me. So, yeah, if you liked the first one, then definitely don’t miss out on this one. And if you do, be forewarned, there’s a mid-end credits scene plus a little joke on the very end of the movie, if you are so inclined to stay.