The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a 2017 production from Summit Entertainment and Millennium Media. Patrick Hughes is the director with Tom O’Conner coming on for the writing. The movie has some big-name stars, including Ryan Renolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Oldman, Salma Hayek, Richard E. Grant and Elodie Yung. The movie scores an alright 6.9/10 on IMDb but received a low Metascore of 47.
The Story
How am I going to describe this story? It is all over the place. It starts with Bryce being a top-tier bodyguard but his client gets killed after which we see him at his lowest. After that, it turns out he isn’t at his lowest, he is still one of the best. The only difference is that he is protecting weird guys instead of criminals? I don’t know who came up with the idea for Seitert’s character but it was just strange to watch.
After this introduction, we get thrown into Belarus where we see a guy shoot someone’s wife and child, a rather gruesome scene for a movie that is supposed to be light-hearted. This a trend that continues throughout, are they trying to make an action movie, a comedy film or a dramatic epic. It looks like they couldn’t decide and made a bad mix of all three. We see the most horrific scenes, such as genocide and terrorist attacks but we’re supposed to laugh because Ryan Renolds is making some sarcastic comments.
The whole plot of the movie didn’t make sense in my opinion. Why would it be so extremely hard to transport a guy from Manchester to The Hague and how do these guys get their extremely heavy guns? It’s not the US, it is Europe, we don’t sell those guns and anyone having such a large supply would be flagged. The government response lacked consistency anyway so why not. While they are in Amsterdam the police and Interpol are actively following Kincaid but when he is driving through The Hague there is no police car to be seen.
They tried to create a nice backstory for our characters through flashbacks but most of the stories felt hastily written without any depth. Bryce and Roussel fell in love because they bumped into each other while working their extremely dangerous jobs? I’m not even going to start on Darius’ love at first sight with Sonia. However, Darius’ backstory did hit me. He told Bryce the story but the moment he told the court that his father was the priest that was killed made it hit home.
The Characters
As I already touched upon, I felt like the characters relationships were butchered, with only Darius having a good backstory. However, that isn’t my biggest problem with these characters. My problem is their immortality. They literally can’t be killed. They get shot multiple times, the enemies miss every shot while shooting with automatic guns and they survive accidents without any scratch. It made me care less for their actions because you knew they wouldn’t die doing it.
The Production
On a production level, I would say they did a good job. Most action scenes felt real because most of them seemed shot on location. I do have to say that the lighting in daylight scenes felt weird. It seemed sort of amplified which bothered me greatly.