In one of the greatest moments of throwing shade of all time David Letterman once asked Arnold Schwarzeneggar if the film he was pimping required setup or was it just "an hour and a half of gunfire." This Reynolds / Jackson payday property actually is an hour and a half of gun file with 30 minutes of swear words and tepid dialog. The movie generally stands out for its sheer and willy nilly body count with extras shot and killed with little thought and often for minor offenses. The presumably more than 200 bullets that hit their mark represent a fraction of the total blanks expended during the full two hour run time. The squib budget on this clunker must of matched the costume budget of the second series of Star Wars films. If you like that sort of thing, this is the bullet buffet for you.
Those less into handgun violence and more into continuity problems will have a field day. At its amoral heart the movie is a road picture on a nonexistent road from Conventry England to the Hauge. As famously happened repeatedly in the Sylvester Stallone's "Cliffhanger" characters are unexplainablely able to find each other in complex environments. Ryan Reynolds's beard varies from more full to more sparse often in the course of the same scene. In a climatic scene a helicopter shoots, firebombs and crashes on Samuel Jackson's character and, much like happened multiple times in Suicide Squad, it doesn't even have the effect of slowing his progress.
In short, kind of a charmless braindead, morally wrong, over-long trifle that somehow attracted a compelling cast.
Review of The Hitman's Bodyguard
