Just call it quips
THE HITMAN’S WIFE’S BODYGUARD
Cert 15 ★★
In cinemas now
Well, it’s better than The Hitman’s Bodyguard, but that could be the very definition of damning with faint praise. That 2007 original was shockingly, offensively bad – a lazy, painfully inept attempt to inject the 80s buddy comedy with swearing, shouting and shonky CGI.
Yet the film was somehow a moderate hit (I still have no idea why) so the sequel gives us more of what made the first film so bad.
Once again, Ryan Reynolds’s uptight bodyguard Michael Bryce is paired with
Samuel L Jackson’s maverick assassin Darius Kincaid.
But this time, the volume gets turned up several notches as Darius’s shouty, potty-mouthed wife Sonia (Salma Hayek) joins the bickering duo on a mission to thwart psycho Greek tycoon Aristotle Papadopolous (Antonio Banderas).
When a film follows a caption reading “Athens” with the word “Greece”, you suspect the film-makers don’t credit their audience with much intelligence.
But perhaps it’s something to do with Banderas’s performance. The actor makes so little effort to change his heavy Castilian accent that you wonder if there’s another
Athens somewhere on the outskirts of Madrid.
So what makes this sequel marginally better than the original? Well, it’s not the action scenes. They’re so choppily put together they could have been edited with a rubber mallet and a pair of garden shears.
My guess is it’s because Ryan Reynolds gave up on the film’s four screenwriters and went off-piste. I found myself smirking as he delivered a couple of amusing and presumably ad-libbed Deadpool-style quips.
The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is at least twice as much fun as the original – and I really don’t want to see that on the poster.
The original film was offensively bad – and this sequel is more of the same