Does every movie really need a sequel? Pretty much any movie that is at least a little bit successful at the box office will get a sequel, that doesn’t mean it needs one. So I can understand why The Hitman’s Bodyguard got a sequel! Sure, I was kind of excited because I love Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson, but truth be told after seeing the sequel, no, it didn’t really need to be made. I’ll get right to the point The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is not really that good of a movie and not even Salma Hayek being a badass with her gorgeous boobs can really save this movie. That might hey bet misogynistic to say, but when half your jokes about her character are about her boobs, I’m not the one to blame. And that should also should tell you something about the writing . Even though it’s a bad movie, Ryan Reynolds, Salma, Hayek and Samuel L. Jackson have good performances, they’re funny, but the story is shit and Antonio Banderas will never make a convincing bad guy even if he was Desperado! Also, not even Morgan Freeman can save this movie and yes this part is a spoiler, we don’t buy him as the bad guy either!
The story is basically Ryan Reynolds’ character getting roped into having to save Salma Hayek and Samuel L Jackson’s character as they’re being hunted while he’s trying to stay away from bodyguarding to find some kind of tranquility. Yes, it’s a high octane action film and all of them are great and yes the one-liners are kind of funny, but also very predictable and we saw it all in the first film! The first film was fairly original… It’s good and you’ll watch it again and again, but the sequel is largely forgettable because it feels like all the good stuff happened in the first film. Same action, same jokes, same action movie tropes. It’s almost as if they just regurgitated the first film, changed a few things here while adding Morgan Freeman and Antonio Banderas and then called it a sequel! And who doesn’t love a predictable action movie… Yes, I’m being sarcastic, but then again Michael Bay keeps making movies!
There are a few things to like in this film. This movie was really made to show off how much of a badass Salma Hayek really is. She is still absolutely gorgeous in her 50s and doesn’t look like she’s aged at all from the movie Desperado. Ryan Reynolds is funny as usual, but this movie resembles more like any number of sequels to the The Fast and Furious where you have to somehow top yourself from the last film and the plot doesn’t really matter. I guess it was nice to get a bit of a backstory of these characters that we grew to love in the first film. Origin stories can be nice, but it’s not enough to save the film. I did laugh a few times, but I almost feel like at least for Ryan Reynolds all of his jokes are just warm up material before Deadpool 3, which is fine, but you shouldn’t charge a full-price movie ticket for that sort of thing! I will say that it’s a fun little action movie with a lot of great one-liners, that can be entertaining, but this is not a film that you should pay a full price movie ticket for and I definitely want my money back! Wait to rent it on Redbox or watch it free on cable. I wish the sequel could have been better, maybe it was a better film, but somehow the editor made it worse. Sometimes the editing is the true culprit of a bad film. If the first film is a good A -, the sequel is definitely a good D +. But at this point, I feel like they need to make a third and treat it like a Windows operating system where the new version is only fixing the old version. So why not round out these movies with a trilogy and the third one can fix the second one, but we all know it’ll never be as good as the first one. If you go to the movie theater to see this film, make sure it’s a matinee or at a dollar theater. It’s not worth full price. But the one advantage of this movie compared to a lot of others is it is a good drinking movie. It is a good movie for day drinking at The Studio Movie Grill or an Alamo Drafthouse. Unfortunately, that’s probably the best part of the movie!
