After the events of the first installment, Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) is struggling to recover. His bodyguard license remains revoked, and he spends his days wallowing in self-pity on his therapist’s couch. To get rid of the bothersome client, she suggests he escape to Capri and leave the bloody business behind. Bryce takes her advice, but trouble finds him even on the idyllic Italian island. His vacation is cut short when Sonia Kincaid (Salma Hayek), the volatile wife of hitman Darius (Samuel L. Jackson), who has been kidnapped by the Italian mafia, drags him back in. She pleads for his help in rescuing her husband.
Ryan Reynolds as Michael in a still from “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”
However, the heroes’ problems don’t end there. Rescuing Darius from the mafia only covers the film’s opening act. Just like in the first movie, Michael and Darius (this time joined by Sonia) find themselves embroiled in a global conspiracy. The main villain is no longer a Belarusian dictator resembling Gary Oldman (who, amusingly, was Bosnian in the Russian dub), but another foreigner with a recognizable face: Aristotle, a Greek billionaire played by Antonio Banderas. Otherwise, the film follows a familiar formula: the same crude humor, the same bloody skirmishes, and the same buddy-movie dynamic where mismatched characters bicker comically but ultimately work together.
Familiar Formula, Bigger Scale
Samuel L. Jackson as Darius in a still from “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”
“Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” adheres to the tired sequel formula of expanding upon the original without adding depth. It takes the same plot concept and simply doubles the details. This worked well in “Kingsman: The Golden Circle,” where such an upgrade was deeply (post-)ironic and transformed the film into a crazy, bloody carnival. In the case of “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” it’s much duller. Instead of two characters working through their issues, we have three, and professional rivalries are replaced by marital ones. The plot revolves around Sonia and Darius’s desire to have a child, which becomes the subject of about 80% of the jokes.
Absurdity That Doesn’t Go Far Enough
The film seems to attempt to embrace complete absurdity (like “Kingsman”) to avoid being seen as derivative. For example, there’s a funny mockery of the characters’ Freudian psychoanalysis (Reynolds’ character suffers from a childhood trauma with a ridiculously absurd cause) and strange details like Michael Bryce’s father being Black. However, “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” never fully commits to its madness, and the rare bursts of absurdity feel like foreign elements. Despite its apparent irony, the film doesn’t emphasize the ridiculousness of the main plot: a Greek billionaire named Aristotle wants to plunge Europe into chaos to restore Greece as the cradle of civilization, or the stereotypes about hackers who can взломать a single cell tower and use it to blow up a couple of neighboring areas.
Salma Hayek as Sonia in a still from “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”
Lackluster Action and Comedy
Worst of all, “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” despite its wacky plot, is surprisingly bland. It suffers from the typical problem of formulaic Hollywood action-comedies, where “action” and “comedy” seem strictly separated. During fight scenes, the camera occasionally focuses on close-ups of the characters making comical comments, but the humor rarely stems directly from the physical action. Given the “small Europe” setting, it’s hard not to think of Jackie Chan’s films, where he also loved to have his character wreak havoc in narrow streets. This serves as an example of how to shoot such a film: don’t hide stunts behind quick cuts (which turns even conceptually interesting episodes into a dull stream of shots in “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”) and don’t separate “funny” from “cool.” Director Patrick Hughes fails to achieve any of this.
He relies more on the script, Reynolds’ and Jackson’s comedic charisma, and Salma Hayek, who plays the most uninhibited character of the trio and swears non-stop. How well “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” works as a dialogue-driven film is hard to say due to the Russian dubbing, which is surprisingly bad this time. The localizers tried to convey the peculiarities of some characters’ speech, which is a great initiative in itself, but the “cucaracha” and “motherf***er” sound painfully stupid coming from the mouths of domestic actors. The same goes for Hayek’s Latin American accent and the Scottish accent of one of the minor characters, who, according to the plot, no one understands by ear (in the dubbing, she speaks Russian like a stereotypical American, “chewing” the sounds). Perhaps it would have been better if the localizers had continued the idea of the film’s advertising posters and made all the characters speak in quotes from Valery Meladze’s songs. Let’s just say that “Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard” is a definite step backward for both the genre and its own franchise, and not quietly or on tiptoe.