The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017)

Belarus – please don’t ask me why they didn’t use a made up country here - dictator Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary “The Russian” Oldman) is standing trial for various counts of mass murder and all that other stuff dictators tend to get up to. Alas, it looks as if he’ll go free to return to his reign of terror, for the eyewitness accounts of his victims are dismissed as “hearsay” (that’s action movie law for you), while other witnesses “mysteriously” disappear or are outright killed by gangs of heavily armed men who totally aren’t working for Dukhovich. Ironically, the only chance of seeing justice done could be the statement of imprisoned professional killer Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson, motherfuckers), who is obviously much more believable a witness (he wrote, not at all sarcastically).

Kincaid is willing to play ball in exchange for the freedom of his also imprisoned wife Sonia (Salma Hayek in a pretty funny cameo role). Unfortunately, there’s a mole (you’ll never guess who, cough) in Interpol, so the transport supposed to cart Kincaid from England where he is jailed to The Hague is ambushed. Only Interpol agent Amelia Roussel (Elektra, ahem, Elodie Yung) and Kincaid manage to escape and hole up in a safe house. Roussel is no dummy and knows someone inside of her organization has sold them out, so she sees only one choice to get Kincaid where he’s supposed to go: rope in her ex-boyfriend Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds and all three of his facial expressions). Until an unfortunate incident for whom he makes her responsible for no good reason, Michael was one of the best professional bodyguards in the world, and he’s certainly not corrupt, so he’s Roussel’s best bet of protecting Kincaid.

Surely, the bodyguard and the hitman who attempted to kill twenty or so of his clients will hit it off sooner or later, or after a lot of bickering and sniggering at each other.

The reluctant buddy action comedy is alive and well, apparently. At least, Patrick Hughes’s film is a perfectly fun time if you’re willing to go with a film who puts no thought or work at all into improving on any of the weaknesses of the formula. So its villain is a bizarre, mildly racist caricature (though one played with vigour and enthusiasm by Oldman, who is not one of the type of actors phoning his stuff in just because the film he’s in is rather silly), the plot only makes the vaguest bit of logical sense, the villain’s plan is even worse, and women aren’t even allowed to beat their old, slightly overweight boss  without male help (which also gives one a bit of mental whiplash if one has seen Yung’s performance as Elektra in Netflix’s Daredevil).

Of course, the first three flaws are also parts of the charm of the genre, so I’m not exactly complaining too loudly here, specifically not in a film that features such a funny central performance by Jackson. Why, it’s a performance popping off the screen so well, I hardly even noticed Reynolds and his tendency to just rotate through his book, well pamphlet, well one-sheet, well, tiny little slip, of facial expressions.


I am sounding rather more cynical towards the film than I actually feel about it: this is a slick, wickedly funny, well paced despite its considerable length (for the kind of thing it is), piece of filmmaking featuring increasingly great – and wilfully absurd – action sequences, as well as Samuel L. Jackson in what feels like an excellent mood, calling people motherfuckers left and right. Why, the film even has a heart.

Some thoughts about Tale of Tales (2015)

Original title: Il racconto dei racconti

I’ve most often seen Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of three tales taken from the fairy tale collection of Giambattista Basile described as an attempt to get back to the roots of non-realist Italian art cinema, and while I certainly see more than just a bit of Fellini after his neo-realist phase in this the director that really comes to my mind here is Walerian Borowczyk. The way Garrone pictures sexuality, unhealthy obsessions and truly horrible things in here is generally not as explicit as Borowczyk could get, and certainly not quite as focussed on sexuality, yet his approach to his themes, as well as the way the film glides from the whimsical to the erotic to the outright horrifying seems quite in parallel to Borowczyk at the height of his powers to me.

I really admire how Garrone seems to zoom in on the weirdest parts of fairy tales presenting it all not with the gesture of somebody who is showing us something deeply grotesque but with the matter-of-factness of someone showing us the grotesque as the quotidian. There’s something incredibly beguiling about a film presenting a king (this one played by Toby Jones) secretly raising a flea in his bedroom as a pet until it’s about as big as a cow as if this sort of thing were just to be expected, not hindering anyone from reading this as a metaphor but certainly inviting us to just take the film at its word. It’s also quite typical for the film that it is exactly this tale that’ll turn out to have some of the more horrifying moments in a film that doesn’t shy away from truly horrifying things beside the poetic, and the sad and the joyful, suggesting that in this world (and every other, one imagines) comedy and tragedy grow from the same root.

The film never falls into the trap of being sumptuous for sumptuousness’s sake either – everything we see and hear has more than just one function, and the film doesn’t bother to explain itself (as neither do fairy tales, really), leaving it up to its audience to interpret intentions, choose one’s own understandings and inhabit the film in one way or the other.