directed by Patrick Hughes
written by Tom O'Connor
Some time ago, somebody came up with the bright idea to cast Samuel L. Jackson as a foul-mouthed hitman in a buddy movie which featured a conversation about Amsterdam called Pulp Fiction, which turned out to be a brilliant movie. Twenty-odd years later, Jackson has been cast in yet another buddy movie as a foul-mouthed hitman, this time actually in Amsterdam, alongside Ryan Reynolds, star of the wildly successful Deadpool and therefore no stranger to hyper-violent, foul-mouthed action movies himself. What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, plenty.
Reynolds plays Michael Bryce, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative who, at the beginning of the film, runs his own very successful personal protection service until one of his prized clients, a Japanese arms dealer, is killed just as his plane is about to take off. Years later, Michael is accepting whatever work he can find to eke out a living, albeit still a very dangerous one. His ex-girlfriend Amelia (Elodie Yung), who works at Interpol, has just been assigned to escort infamous hitman Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) a key witness in the trial of the despotic Belarusian President Dukhovich (Gary Oldman), from his prison in England to the Hague in the Netherlands, where he is set to testify in exchange for the freedom of his wife Sonia (Salma Hayek). When her convoy is ambushed and her entire detail wiped out, she can only think of one man up to the task of bringing Kincaid to the trial alive.
The problem of this film is essentially one of tone. I read it was conceived originally as a drama and then re-purposed into a comedy (which, let's face it, with a title like that, was the only way to go), and it shows. The film features gut-wrenching violence but, unlike Reynolds' Deadpool, which had its tongue firmly in its cheek the whole time, alternates between comedy and utter seriousness and fails to juggle the two. The problem is that the "serious" stuff feels like it was done in extremely bad taste; the bad guy's use of a truck bomb at a time when vehicles have been repeatedly used as tools of terrorist attacks feels utterly insensitive, and even the violence that was supposed to be vaguely funny like Ryan Reynolds' Bryce being tortured by jumper cables attached to a wet towel around his head, just wasn't. Also, if the drastically shifting tone was meant to be some kind of storytelling innovation, it fell short of the mark, especially considering the number of action movie cliches director Patrick Hughes and screenwriter Tom O'Connor leaned on throughout the film. Jackson's and Reynolds' onscreen chemistry is the only bright spot in this film, but even that feels weighed down by a horrible script. Clearly these guys were just hired to trot out Jules-lite and Deadpool-lite, and they delivered on that front, even though their performances felt like poor facsimiles of their best work. Jackson quite literally recycled on one of his lines from Pulp Fiction, quite possibly at the urging of the director.
It was really quite disappointing, especially since I walked into this movie with minimal expectations and largely on the strength of the marketing, which made hilarious parodies of the Kevin Costner-Whitney Houston smash hit from 1992, The Bodyguard, ranging from the extensive use of Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You" in the trailers to a movie poster which replicated the one from the older movie, except with Reynolds carrying Jackson. The thing is, every now and again there are flashes of the movie I was hoping to see when I walked in; sometimes the humor works, and some of the action sequences are pretty interesting, particularly an extended chase scene involving a speed boat, SUVs and a motorcycle. But it's all weighed down by the "serious" plot which is premised on the notion that prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is a complete moron who would pin all his hopes for convicting Dukhovich on a single witness, as well as the numerous eye-roll inducing cliches peppered throughout the story.
Clearly, though, Reynolds and Jackson were in it for the paycheck; here's hoping that they get back to making good movies soon.
5/10
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