Movie: The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard

This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.

Love in the Trenches

Plot Overview

Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) dreams of becoming AAA Bodyguard of the Year, but his license is under review, and his shrink Joanna (Rebecca Front) has terminated his therapy and sent him to Greece on sabbatical (“No more body­guarding for you.”) Professional assassin Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) and his con woman wife Sonia (Salma Hayek) are honey­mooning in Europe, trying to make a baby. When an enemy snatches Darius, Sonia enlists Michael to help retrieve him. Boston cop Mr. O'Neil, on loan to Interpol, rounds up the lot of them for various infractions.

Greek aristocrat Aristotle Papdopolous (Antonio Banderas) has kidnapped Walter Fiscer (Brian Caspe) head of the European Union as hostage to his plan to sabotage the electrical grid of Europe through vulnerable junction boxes until Greece is restored to her former place as the center of civilization. O'Neil's super­visor Madame Crowly orders him to drop what­ever else he's doing and infiltrate some agents into Papdopolous's organization. Having nobody else available on short notice he conscripts those three misfits in his custody to do it in exchange for their liberty.

In their perambulations they make a cathartic stop to visit Michael's old man Bryce (Morgan Freeman) to help Michael get over his father's rejection of him for his failings in the executive protection racket. Michael must also engage in hand-to-hand combat with Magnuson the current Bodyguard of the Year who is protecting Papdopolous. If they “do things the Boston way,” all that will remain is the paper­work to reinstate Michael's license and for the Kincaids to adopt, but it's a big order.

Ideology

Papdopolous rattles off a précis of impressive past Greek achievements in art, science, government, and architecture. In a weird way Darius tops that when commenting on Michael's mixed step-parentage: “You can't let a mother­[eff]er you share not one drop of DNA with to define you!” Technically, since we're all descendants of Adam and Eve there's at least one drop of blood in common for all of humanity. For that matter there was a restart after the flood of Noah, to wit, (Gen. 9:18-19) “And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth over­spread.” From Shem come the Semites, of course. Writer Bodie Hodge holds forth that: “Generally, from the Middle East in the land of Shinar (modern-day Iraq, where Babel was), Japheth's descendants went north toward Europe and Asia, Ham's went toward Africa, and Shem's remained in the Middle East” (183). Hodge reiterates that “As a general trend, Ham is the father of many peoples in Africa” (122). Dr. Ide adds, “Ham sired four sons: Cush (translates as ‘black’) … and Canaan the youngest” (62). In our movie the Interpol guys were European, as were the bad guys over there. The shrink had a British accent and the cop a Bostonian. Sonia was Latina. Michael looks to be of European descent. These all were from the bloodline of Japheth—or of Shem if any of them were Jews. Hitman Darius and the elder Price, on the other hand, were African-American, which separates their bloodlines from the others' one generation after Noah. Okay.

This movie starts with bodyguard Michael having been working too hard and in need of a break. That's like Noah's father Lamech naming his kid with the Hebrew word for rest or comfort, (Gen. 5:29) “And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed.” After the flood one day, Noah took some leisure time, stripped down, and got drunk in his tent where he was discovered by his youngest son Ham who complained about it to his two older brothers (Gen. 9:20-23). Ham was perturbed that his father had gotten naked with­out setting about to procreate as God commanded—Yes, Noah sired no more children after the flood. Ham also didn't like his father taking a recess from rebuilding the wrecked world. Noah's rejoinder was along the lines of, “Oy vey! You want we should have children and work harder? Okay, your little ones can be slaves to your brothers'. Oy vey!” (Gen. 9:24-27). In our movie the three Interpol involuntary conscripts were the African- American, and his wife, and the step-son of another African-American.

Javan was (Gen. 10:2) one of the sons of Japheth. According to Hodge, “Javan is the Hebrew name for Greece.” (165) “Genesis 10:5, immediately after recording the sons of Japheth and specifically Javan, mentions that these people were spread out as the ‘coast­line’ people. These were the maritime peoples, or people who went by boat” (166). Papdopolous in this movie conducts some of his business from his yacht. Historian J.M. Roberts tells of, “the hidden pervasiveness even today of Greek influences in our collective life — in art, politics, science — ; they become quite explicit when we go back a few centuries into European history” (23). When Noah said, (Gen. 9:27) “God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant,” he was envisioning a worldwide culture inclusive of Shem and Japheth's descendants (with Ham's including Canaan in a servant class.) The tent of European western culture Papdopolous was touting was a subset of that culture. Different leaders appeared from time to time, and Pap just wanted to reassert Greece, perhaps along the lines mentioned in a writing of Matt Rees: “The psych told me that Freud wrote some­thing like this: Wars happen because being civilized is too much stress for human beings. Every couple of years we have to go totally wing nut and fight a war” (126). A fictional villain goes wing nut to fuel this movie. Whatever.

So Michael went to Greece and was relaxing in beach wear on the sand with a book. He was a chip off the old Noah block who stripped down and got drunk in his tent. He was rudely interrupted by Sonia who had misheard an instruction from her black husband whose Negro voice in the lower registers conveys power but not information so much, as would the higher pitched voices of the ruling class. The craziness that resulted is an instance of, (Prov. 30:21-22) “the earth is disquieted, and … it cannot bear: For a servant when he reigneth.”

In a flashback from Michael's youth we see him with his peaches & cream complexioned mother at the fair. His mother waits for him by the Parachute while he goes to get him a Gelato. He gets mint and chocolate chip rather than the peach, which he tortures him­self over later in life, as if being some­how responsible for his new step-parentage sprinkling a black chip into the mix and disrupting the world order. While his mom was waiting the Parachute broke and killed her.

To top off the psychological drama of the film, his black step-father was on his case for being too color blind for his job. He can't be a top body­guard without doing some serious profiling. Say you were a nature guide. You want to protect your troop from poisonous reptiles, right? So how do you tell them apart? Well, the poisonous snakes have elliptical pupils like cats eyes, nonpoisonous ones have round pupils. Just get up close and look it in the eye. Don't want to do that? Okay, then do some profiling by skin color. The top body­guards don't wait to get intimate with potential threats before forming a preliminary judge­ment. They factor in (horrors!) skin color rather than engage in equality chauvinism.

Production Values

“” (2021) is a sequel to “The Hitman's Bodyguard” (2017). It was directed by Patrick Hughes. Its screen­play writers were Tom O'Connor, Brandon Murphy and Phillip Murphy. It stars Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, and Salma Hayek. Antonio Banderas and Morgan Freeman appear also to spice it up. The leads invest their characters with appropriate degrees of dementia and psychosis. Hayek was especially barmy.

MPAA rated it R for strong bloody violence through­out, pervasive language, and some sexual content. The cinema­tog­rapher was Terry Stacey. The torture scene only tormented one of the three on the rack. The screen kiss was about the worst of all time, but I kept my seat hoping the distracted driving would cut it short. The music was bombastic.

Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation

I would not recommend this film for movie night on the mental ward. Violent video game aficionados might enjoy it.

Movie Ratings

Action factor: Edge of your seat action-packed. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Well, at least you can't see the strings. Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Overall movie rating: Three stars out of five.

Works Cited

Scripture quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Print. Software.

Hodge, Bodie. Tower of Babel: The Cultural History of Our Ancestors. Green Forest, AR: New Leaf Pub., 2013. Print.

Ide, Arthur Frederick. Noah & the Ark: The Influence of Sex, Homo­phobia and Hetero­sexism in the Flood Story and its Writing. Las Colinas: Monument Press, 1992. Print.

Rees, Matt. China Strike. Copyright © 2017 by Matt Rees. New York: Crooked Lane Books, 2017. Print.

Roberts, J.M. A History of Europe. New York: Penguin Press, 1997. Print.