The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard

This dire action-comedy feels like it was thrown together with a minimum of care and attention.

There’s a special effect currently doing the rounds, mostly in production-line comedy films with moderate budgets, in which a person is suddenly run over by some kind of fast moving vehicle. Usually you’ll have a medium shot of your victim, and they will be standing there in a state of mild repose, unexpecting of incoming trauma, and then suddenly, from either frame left or frame right, a car will whizz into view and send them tumbling like a CG ragdoll.

It’ll probably take a cine-sleuth of considerable talent to trace this now commonplace motif back to its very own patient zero, but I have a feeling that Brad Pitt getting tenderised by a couple of speeding RVs while dawdling in the middle of a busy high street in Martin Brest’s Meet Joe Black may have some explaining to do. While it has often been used for shock effects and jump scares, it’s also being used increasingly for comic purposes – even rolled out in recent kiddie comedy, Peter Rabbit 2.

This “move”, now so hackneyed as to barely register as either shocking or humorous, is wheeled out multiple times in Patrick Hughes’ almost surreally incomprehensible The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. Each time, Ryan Reynolds’ preppy, once AAA-rated bodyguard Michael Bryce is sent flying, once over the roof of a runaway Trabant, and is later shunted into the shallows of a nearby harbour. Yes, yes, very funny. Let’s have the annoying character humiliated in a traffic accident so we can emit a giant belly laugh as we witness his limp frame hurtling through the air only to be crumpled onto the hard tarmac.

The reason why I flag this is twofold: it’s a signpost for the film’s crassly retrofitted style, where every creative decision appears to have been made as a result of necessity rather than desire. The film mostly takes place in Italy for no reason. A deal has been made where a selection of Italian tourist hotspots have been made available for filming, and the story takes place in those places rather than inhabiting them with a purpose. This effect features in the film because the technology to execute the effect is available for use and is relatively simple to operate. It’s not  there as the result of creative innovation.

It’s also a sign of the film’s retrograde sense of humour in which physical pain and swearing is the only currency worth a damn. What irks me about this running over effect is that, even since it was seen over two decades ago in Meet Joe Black, it somehow looks as bad now as it did then. There’s something supremely off-putting about a digital effect that is intended to seamlessly replicate reality, but looks absolutely nothing like it. When Reynolds is run over, you can see the moment where the actor is replaced with a pixelated rendering of his body, and he’s off down the studio bar for happy hour and the rest is hashed out in post.

If it doesn’t look even vaguely real, then what’s the point? If anything, wouldn’t it be funnier to do a practical version of the effect where Reynolds is replaced by an obvious dummy and then returns to Reynolds when the main impact is completed? It’s not the job of a critic to tell a filmmaker how to make a film, but it would seem strange not to advise of the numerous open goals available. Whatever… Hollywood should retire this effect immediately. It is dumb and inauthentic and it would appear that no-one working in the world of computer effects has yet worked out how to employ it in a way that’s even mildly appealing.

Aside from the across-the-board atrocious effects work (including a climactic explosion looks like it was rendered on a defective Amiga 500), there’s a couple of cheap laughs to be had in this quickie cash-in sequel, mainly care of Salma Hayek’s dirty Spanglish-speaking conwoman Sonia, who is given the lion share of the script’s juicy one-liners. Reynolds, who seems like a stand-up guy (no, literally, he acts like he’s doing stand-up!), is deep slumming with cheapjack material like this, though there are a few palpable hits among the myriad misses. Samuel L Jackson, meanwhile, looks like he’s rocked up to the set in his civilian clothes, has made-up all his own lines, and the director has just said, “yeah, whatever, go with it.”

Published 18 Jun 2021

Tags: Ryan Reynolds Salma Hayek Samuel L Jackson The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard