All in Good Fun
Somewhere in the European action film hinterland between Johnny English and The Transporter, there lies a movie, not quite funny enough to be in the former camp, nor quite well choreographed to be in latter.
That move is called The Hitman’s Bodyguard.
The story opens in London, where we meet “AAA-rated” bodyguard Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) as he choreographs the transit of a rich client to his private jet. Fast cuts, splits screens, and a valiant horn section insist that what we’re seeing is all very cool.
In effect, it’s more like watching a wedding planner, except that in most weddings, the guest of honor doesn’t wind up with a bullet through the head – at least, not in the traditional Anglican rites.
Thus, the client is killed. And we watch Bryce’s expression morph from cool self-assurance…to horror…to eventually bitter resignation as he sits in a cheap compact car, years later, peeing into a plastic bottle.
His chance at redemption comes in the form of Samuel L. Jackson, ostensibly playing a convicted hitman named Darius Kincaid, but really, as always, playing Jackson.
Anyway, Kincaid is being shuttled from London to Holland in order to give testimony against Belarussian dictator Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary Oldman) in a war crimes trial. His police escort is immediately murdered, leaving only the lovely inspector Amelia Roussel (Elodie Yung), to get him to the International Criminal Court…in just 24 hours!
Watching it all unfold, we wondered briefly why the Interpol lawyers could not have simply asked for a continuance. That might have given the screenwriters a chance to rewrite the script.
And given the wealth of talent on their hands – not just Reynolds and Jackson, but also Salma Hayek (playing Kincaid’s hell raiser wife Sonia) and Joaquim de Almeida (Roussel’s boss) – it seems a shame they didn’t take a little more time to really give these stars something to say.
Jackson gets the worst of it because of the nature of his routine, which includes a lot of talking, sermonizing, and shit shooting. The poor writing leaves him flailing around with nonsense lines like “when life gives you shit, make kool-aid.”
Meanwhile Reynolds, who found much success with a sort of Internet troll irony in 2016’s Deadpool, seeks to continue the shtick here. Again, the script isn’t there for him. His character is caught between providing an uptight foil for Jackson’s fast and loose style, and trying to command a cool of its own.
Attempts at bonding the two through humor (e.g. Jackson and Reynolds loudly singing different songs at the same time in the same car) are, on the whole, unsuccessful, save one or two chuckles – when Bryce, verging on a cathartic make-up with an ex-girlfriend, is suddenly ejected through his windshield and finds himself somehow standing up, dazed, in the headlights of his own car.
Where the filmmakers should have found comedy – in the blatant exposition, the cars that explode upon a single scratch, the henchmen who still can’t shoot straight, and the overexposed, out of focus footage – is precisely where we find them at their most solemn.
Oh but it’s just a bit of fun, they’ll say. It’s an action movie, they’ll protest. Fact is: it’s lazy. In one scene Roussell’s cell phone rings and – I kid you not – the caller ID actually says “Interpol.”
At what point does lack of care become an outright insult?
***
Little Evil, a straight-to-Netflix movie starring Adam Scott (Big Little Lies, Parks n Rec) and Evangeline Lilly (Lost) is summarized on the website with the following tagline:
Think it’s tough being a new stepdad? At least you’re not Gary. He’s pretty sure his kid is literally the Antichrist.
I chuckled as I read that. And if you did too, then you’ll enjoy this extremely light horror-comedy.
The genre is not one we would typically recommend in these pages. Like pain and sex, the emotions involved just never quite seem to be an organic fit. To be sure, horror-comedy has its devotees, but in fairness to the rest of us, they are all scandalous perverts and merit no further mention here.
We need not get too far into the story – Gary (Adam Scott) has just married Samantha (Evangeline Lilly) and must now forge a bond with his stepson Lucas, a kid of uncertain patrilineality whose interests include sitting in the dark, staring into TV static, talking with his horned goat puppet, and causing people to kill themselves.
The intimation here is that Lucas’s father may have been the devil. However, given the boy’s predilection for school boy uniforms and cabby hats, there’s at least an equal chance he was sired by Angus Young. Sadly, the movie leaves this possibility woefully unexplored.
Anyway, once Child Services begins to investigate the kid’s odd behavior, they immediately suspect Gary. The child is never to blame, an agent tells us.
Well sure, but what if the little shit talks back?
No dice – Gary is sent to a step father’s support group, where a smattering of comic actors (including Chris D’Elia, Donald Falson, and Kyle Bornheimer) compete with one another to adopt the more outrageous posture towards their newfound charges. It’s good fun. The jewel of them all is Al (Bridget Everett), the “stepfather” to her wife’s son from a previous marriage. As a conceit, it works a bit like a prop in an early Steve Martin routine – adding flavor to every scene while never being addressed or challenged.
All credit here goes to Everett. In a big budget flick the role would have gone to Melissa McCarthy, who, despite her merits, would have likely ruined it by turning Al’s masculinity into loud, silly pantomime. Everett, on the other hand, plays it sans complexe, which is just enough to keep it endearing and funny.
And that’s the central strength of Little Evil – the characters play it light, uncomplicated, generally oblivious, and have a lot of fun doing so. Only Gary seems to see things as they really are. It’s a similar story telling style to that commonly found in slapstick movies like Naked Gun or Airplane. And if there is one criticism we would make, it is that we can only imagine how really funny the movie might have been had its makers opted to go that direction.