★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
Ryan Reynolds stars as Michael Bryce, a professional bodyguard looking to restore his damaged reputation in this self-satisfied smirk of an action comedy. Bryce’s ex, Ameila (Elodie Yung), an agent at Interpol, begs for his help to escort incarcerated assassin, Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) from the streets of Coventry to a trial at The Hague. Determined to stop the pair is defendant Vladislav Dukhovich (a supremely bored-looking Gary Oldman), a convicted war criminal with ties to ethnic cleansing. Yep, that’s right, the main subplot in this knockabout buddy comedy is about genocide. Mass graves and anatomy jokes; it’s a match made in heaven!
At least, it is for Jackson: I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw him so happy. While it’s not a particularly revolutionary role (smattered with a meta gag or two about his infamous devotion to the MF-word), it’s nice to see he’s having a laugh…because the audience sure ain’t. I counted one chuckle amongst the crowd during my matinee, at a fart noise. Comedy lives?
If Jackson’s performance is a hopeful reflection of how we’re meant to feel, Reynolds is the realisation of our true feelings; namely boredom and resignation. That’s to say nothing of Elodie Yung and Salma Hayek (as Kincaid’s imprisoned wife). Come on, people, it’s 2017, is it really too much to ask that roles for women offer them more than to be sexually objectified (Hayek), to be rescued from fights with out-of-shape men that their character should easily be able to defeat (Yung), or just plain forgotten for entire acts of the movie (see both)?
When the film’s not saddling its women with perplexing double-agent plot threads or giggling along with the chummy antics of the central duo, it displays some genuinely respectable action sequences. A bike ‘n’ boat chase through Amsterdam packs a wallop, but it’s like someone airlifted a separate production crew in to film it. The shooty-stabby brawls elsewhere in the movie are efficiently swift, but the ruthlessness of the gore is never quite reconciled by the one-liners. There’s barely even a Nice Guys-style pause from Reynolds to pale at the carnage accrued by his client, and his reactions to Jackson’s guffawing amount to little more than parental exasperation.
Anyone paying a modicum of attention knows where Kincaid and Bryce’s relationship is heading, but just to make sure, the movie deploys heavy-handed musical cues at every possible moment to light our way. If it’s not through Atli Örvarsson’s sub-David Arnold score, it’s by calculated deployment of Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is; a tactic which proved the final straw for me. Granted, not for the reason it’ll irk many people (I actually like the track, despite its place in the eighties soft rock canon I wish would disappear from pop culture for five seconds), but it’s still unearned and – like the endless CGI blood splatter – extravagantly cheap.
At least, it is for Jackson: I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw him so happy. While it’s not a particularly revolutionary role (smattered with a meta gag or two about his infamous devotion to the MF-word), it’s nice to see he’s having a laugh…because the audience sure ain’t. I counted one chuckle amongst the crowd during my matinee, at a fart noise. Comedy lives?
If Jackson’s performance is a hopeful reflection of how we’re meant to feel, Reynolds is the realisation of our true feelings; namely boredom and resignation. That’s to say nothing of Elodie Yung and Salma Hayek (as Kincaid’s imprisoned wife). Come on, people, it’s 2017, is it really too much to ask that roles for women offer them more than to be sexually objectified (Hayek), to be rescued from fights with out-of-shape men that their character should easily be able to defeat (Yung), or just plain forgotten for entire acts of the movie (see both)?
When the film’s not saddling its women with perplexing double-agent plot threads or giggling along with the chummy antics of the central duo, it displays some genuinely respectable action sequences. A bike ‘n’ boat chase through Amsterdam packs a wallop, but it’s like someone airlifted a separate production crew in to film it. The shooty-stabby brawls elsewhere in the movie are efficiently swift, but the ruthlessness of the gore is never quite reconciled by the one-liners. There’s barely even a Nice Guys-style pause from Reynolds to pale at the carnage accrued by his client, and his reactions to Jackson’s guffawing amount to little more than parental exasperation.
Anyone paying a modicum of attention knows where Kincaid and Bryce’s relationship is heading, but just to make sure, the movie deploys heavy-handed musical cues at every possible moment to light our way. If it’s not through Atli Örvarsson’s sub-David Arnold score, it’s by calculated deployment of Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is; a tactic which proved the final straw for me. Granted, not for the reason it’ll irk many people (I actually like the track, despite its place in the eighties soft rock canon I wish would disappear from pop culture for five seconds), but it’s still unearned and – like the endless CGI blood splatter – extravagantly cheap.
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