Bodyguard Michael Bryce always considered himself to be the best of the best. Well, that’s what he always wanted to be: a great bodyguard, just like his father before him. But since crossing paths and actually taking a bullet for the notorious hitman Darius Kincaid, Bryce’s dreams of bodyguard glory have crumbled into nightmarish visions of ineptitude and failure.
He lost his triple-A rated bodyguard license because of Darius and has actually been in therapy to rid himself of an abundance of anxious emotional torment for a long time since. And after all that work, Bryce is finally able to get his life back in order.
No, not as a bodyguard. He’s taking a sabbatical from guns and violence. In fact, he’s going to enjoy a nice vacation and cleanse his mind of all that. He’s going to ease back into a sense of good mental health.
Ahhh.
Of course, that’s just before Darius’ wife, the infamous international con-artist Sonia Kincaid, shows up. And then brains start splattering, bodies start stacking and everything else explodes. It turns out that Darius is in trouble and he sent Sonia to fetch help in the form of one Michael Bryce.
Well, actually he said, “get anyone but Bryce,” but Sonia misheard in all the noise of bullets richocheting and brains splattering. So, wouldn’t you know it, just as Bryce was getting himself free of all this, some noisy death-dealing drags him back in. Well, that and a crazy woman who’s even more volitile and deadly than Darius himself.
And what exactly is Michael Bryce helping the dangerous Darius and Sonia with? Oh, who cares! There are Interpol agents and megalomaniacal big bosses at each other’s throats. The world is about to burn. People are shooting, things are exploding, goo is gushing and f-bombs are dropping.
There’s gotta be a plot in there somewhere!
In the midst of all the many negatives here, the newly married Darius and Sonia are very much in love and very much hoping to have a baby. And you get the sense that Michael Bryce could have been an upstanding guy and a loving son if things had played differently.
Upon hearing that Sonia and Darius want to have a child, Bryce cries out, “God have mercy on our souls!” And after he takes a shotgun blast for Sonia, she murmurs that he should have been a priest because of his kindness.
Later, after something good happens, Sonia lifts up a silent prayer to the heavens.
Sonia is regularly ogled by Darius and other males around her (and the camera’s eye). She not only wears several different form-fitting and low-cut outfits, but in one scene she takes off her shirt and runs around in a very revealing bustier.
As newlyweds, Sonia and Darius make it clear that they’re still in their honeymoon phase, and so we see them kissing and making out repeatedly. They also have fully clothed, noisy sex twice while Bryce is forced to listen. The majority of the sexual movement is just off screen, but the action is clear. And the two also talk afterward about their orgasm. Sonia threatens to sexually abuse Bryce with a sex toy. Bryce pushes on Sonia’s chest while shoving her out of the range of a gun blast.
Other women reveal cleavage. And the movie is rife with crude sexual jokes.
Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is a cacophony of carnage—sometimes played as a sort of joke with bodies flying everywhere in slow motion. Heads explode and bullets (sometimes shot from a distance, sometimes in execution-style close-ups) splatter brains and goo on people and scenery.
A man is smothered with a plastic bag, another stabbed through the chin. People have their eyes gouged out off camera, but we see the bloody results. A guy is hit repeatedly by quickly moving vehicles, and he later crashes through a car window while driving. Things are blown up by RPG shells and explosives of various stripes. Vehicles smash, crash and blow up in the course of several car chases, and a helicopter explodes in the air. A woman is killed by a heavyset man falling out of a carnival ride. (Another woman talks of her mom being eaten by a shark.) A guy is hit repeatedly with a cattle prod. People are strangled and beaten; necks are snapped. Several individuals are killed with knives and swords and one guy has his throat ripped out by a swinging mace. And, of course, people are shot in the chest, arms, legs and crotch.
Did I mention that a lot of things blow up?
More than 100 f-words and 25 s-words join multiple uses of “b–ch,” “a–hole” and “d–n.” There are some 10 crude exclamations of male and female genitalia (including two uses of the c-word). And God’s and Jesus’ names are abused eight times total (God being combined with “d–n” once).
People drink wine at dinner and booze in clubs. During a bar fight, someone grabs an open bottle of booze and begins swigging away. Someone suggests doing some coke. Several people are shot with knock-out darts. And one guy gets about six of them shot into his face.
After taking a shotgun blast to his Kevlar vest, Bryce is given several “pain pills” that turn out to be Lithium. They have the expected debilitating result.
A father betrays his son and tells him he is a stain on his legacy.
Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is one of those sequels that enthusiastically embraces the cinematic postulate that bigger … no, bombastically bigger is always better. So, it takes the insanely bloody violence, vulgar one-liners and the mindless destruction of the first film and sets that as its starting line.
Yeah, there’s definitely a sense that this cartoon of crassitude has been doused with gasoline, strapped to a bucket of bottle rockets and hit with a blowtorch. But once the fifth or sixth head blows out on a back wall, and the hundredth f-bomb rattles your eardrums, I mean, where ya gonna go?
It certainly ain’t up.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
