IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (S. Wloszczyna) review
AVClub (I. Vishnevetsky) review
The Hitman's Bodyguard [2017] (directed by Patrick Hughes, screenplay by Tom O'Connor) is a surprisingly current and perhaps prophetic comedy that reminds us that sometimes it really requires a court jester to warn "the powers that be" that something is deeply awry.
In the film, a fictionalized thug named Vladislav Dikhovich (played by Gary Oldman) ex-president of a midsized post-Soviet/post-Communit State, nominally Belorussia but he could have been from any number of post-Soviet / post-Communist States across Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucuses finds himself on trial at the International Criminal Court at the Hague for War Crimes / Crimes Against Humanity. Yet eye witnesses to his crimes tend to die or "change their stories" for fear of death or the death of their loved ones.
What to do? Well there is one possible witness, an incarcerated African American contract assassin named Darius Kincaid (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who along with his Mexican wife Sonia (played by Salma Hayek) are rotting away (separately) in maximum security prisons in Britain. Sonia is by all accounts "a small fish." She's being held by the authorities to provide pressure on Darius. Why? Because of the circles in which he operated, he could provide information on, and here, in a pinch, even testify against such thugs as Vladislav Dikhovich.
Obviously, the authorities would have preferred to use more meritorious witnesses to testify against Dikhovich but ... as I already mentioned, they tended to find bullets in their heads or be so credibly threatened by Dikhovich's henchmen that they tended to "walk away" from their previous statements. So all the prosecutors at the ICC were left with was ... the testimony of someone like Darius Kincaid.
But even getting this clearly less than ideal witness from England to Holland proved to be frighteningly difficult. Dikhovich's henchmen ambushed Interpol's heavily armed convoy escorting Kincaid from his prison somewhere near Manchester, England to the Hague. Clearly, with the stakes this high, even Interpol's security was compromised.
What to do? Well certainly motivated / tough as nails but still relative rookie Interpol officer Amelia Roussel (played by Elodie Yung) who had been, quite surprisingly, given the task of getting Kincaid to his destination, recognizes that she can't trust her own people to complete this mission. So she calls on an American ex-boyfriend named Michael Bryce (played by Ryan Reynolds) who runs a low-key private security firm to get Kincaid across still much of England, across the Channel and then to the Hague. Bryce's operation is "low key" because he had had a terrible mishap in his work (lost a client) some years back, a mishap that he blamed on Roussel. Roussel knew that she was not at fault, and thus continued to trust Bryce's capabilities in "getting the job done" even as Bryce himself seemed to feel (bitterly) that he was destined to work "small potatoes" jobs.
Of course Bryce's "low key" security operation was exactly what was needed to get Kincaid to the Hague _largely_ "under the radar." Yet, of course, much had to ensue ...
Yes, dear Readers, one could dismiss this film as Mission Impossible / Jason Bourne-like pulp. Yet, this film is arguably more serious than the MI films and more current than the Jason Bourne ones:
This current film asks some very sharp questions of the very project of the International Criminal Court: To get even the Serbian war criminals Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić and the biggest fish
Slobodan Milošević required years of waiting (for arguably the overthrow of the government in Serbia). To get someone like the fictionalized Vladislav Dikhovich (from a far larger state than the statelets of former Yugoslavia) to the Hague at all would be _really difficult_. Further, given that a former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was, in fact, poisoned as a candidate (by dioxin) by presumably Russian FSB agents because he was running then on a platform opposed to the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin, IT IS ENTIRELY POSSIBLE that the arrest of pro-Putin strongmen leading pro-Russian states and stateless across the former Soviet Union for War Crimes / Crimes Against Humanity COULD PRODUCE THE KIND OF CARNAGE envisioned in the current film as they, like the fictionalized "Belorussian" strongman Dikhovich in this film could well choose to defend themselves, their interests and those of their friends by truly _any_ means necessary. (This film seems to predict a very ugly and violent future awaiting us ... if we take seriously the I.C.C. and its mission. A true drive to "clear the swamp" could produce a real bloodbath... This MAY prove necessary as unchecked corruption only makes things worse, but let's go into such a project with eyes open...).
Then Kincaid has a back-story and his first brush with Terrorism was _not_ with bearded olive skinned Middle Eastern types but rather with white racists who murdered his preacher father in Alabama...
So all in all, this "court jester" of a film points out some really unnerving stuff: (1) True "big fish" war criminals aren't exactly easy to apprehend and their networks of henchmen and hidden kingpins could very well choose to fight back, and (2) to people of color and minority religions in the U.S. don't necessarily have "Middle Eastern" terrorists to fear. White men with hoods over their heads or wearing Nazi armbands scare just fine.
One surprisingly unnerving "comedy"
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