The Hitman's Bodyguard's Wife

 

While I’m loathe to fall back on simply reviewing whatever movie I happened to have watched before Friday, in this case a pair of movies was remarkable enough to warrant my review in this context.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017).  The original film starts things off.  Michael Bryce (Ryan “Deadpool” Reynolds) is a top level executive bodyguard in the present day.  However, his career took a hit – quite literally – when his client, Kurosawa, was abruptly assassinated despite his best, most diligent efforts to protect him, by some unknown assassin. 

Meanwhile, a particularly nasty Byelorussian dictator, Dukhovich (Gary the Old Man), is on trial in The Hague, Netherlands, for war crimes, mainly various Einsatzgruppen style massacres 60 something years after the original series.  He has managed to wipe out all witnesses, except one: a hitman, Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson).  Bryce winds up escorting Kincaid across England to Dover, by ferry to Holland, through Amsterdam and then to The Hague to beat a 5 p.m. deadline to testify, otherwise the case against Dukhovich will fail and he’ll be released, presumably to resume his prior position as dictator and mass murderer – an outcome most would consider suboptimal.

Naturally, Dukhovich has some moles in the UN/Interpol hierarchy who give his Russian henchmen fairly accurate information about Bryce & Kincaid’s whereabouts at any given point, so the quest is almost a continuous shootfest of bloodshed, car crashes, explosions, etc. all the way to The Hague. 

By the way – Kincaid has a provocatively attractive wife, Sonia (Salma Hayek) whose release from a maximum security womens’ prison will be a reward for his testimony against Dukhovich. 

By now I’ve seen countless of these type of films, the most annoying being the obvious implausibility of all these crashes and deaths, clearly an orgy of CGI.   In fact, it’s so implausible it becomes de facto science fiction rather than action.  Moreover, Jackson is just as arrogant and “my dick is bigger than yours” as ever, especially having the ever-hot Hayek as his wife.  However, when the dust clears, all the casings fall, and the guns are dropped on the ground, I found it as entertaining as any of the other films of this nature and enjoyable for that reason.

The Hitman’s Wife's Bodyguard (2021).  Now Sonia is out of prison, ostensibly celebrating her honeymoon with Kincaid, which seems to be spent – along with Bryce – attempting to foil another ubervillain, Aristotle Papdopolous, a super rich Greek rich guy (Antonio Banderas) who plans on destroying Europe’s power grid with a virus from his yacht.  We also learn who Bryce’s step-father, Bryce, Sr., is…. Played by Morgan Freeman.  So here you get SLJ AND Morgan Freeman in the same film.  Not a bad combination.   The narrative begins with Bryce trying to enjoy his bodyguard license suspension in peace and quiet, predictably disrupted when Sonia shanghai’s him into rescuing Kincaid, who has been kidnapped by the Italian Mob – given a face –“Carlo” by Syrio Forel, who we know from Game of Thrones as Arya’s fencing instructor.  Carlo was the UN’s confidential source on Aristotle’s diabolical plans, so Kincaid, Bryce and Sonia wind up in the middle of the whole mess. 

Oh, need I mention that Sonia wants children, and relentlessly harasses Darius about his apparent inability to impregnate her, so the dialogue between the two is predictably saucy.  And the issue of whose eggs or whose sperm is at fault is quite explicitly discussed - as are their heroic, high octane multiple orgasm attempts to conceive.  As you might imagine, all such attempts occur off-camera, the audience treated to the subsequent bickering about her NOT missing her period.

This time around Sonia is front and center in the narrative – and it turns out she had a prior relationship with Aristotle, until she fell off his yacht, suffered amnesia, and married Kurt Russell.  Oops, wrong movie - and part of the charm of this film is explicitly acknowledging lifting the plot of the Goldie Hawn version. 

What’s a little frustrating is that, as hot as she obviously is, Hayek isn’t showing any more skin than she did in “Dusk Til Dawn” – in fact, far less, despite the fact that we know in real life she’s proud to still have such a killer figure at her current age.  For that matter, Christina Hendricks, the buxom redhead in “Mad Men”, “Tin Star”, and now “Good Girls”, doesn’t even seem to strip down to a bikini, much less nudity, despite – or perhaps because of – her obvious assets.  She had a sex (sorry, have to laugh here) scene in “Tin Star” in which she’s fully clothed.  Kind of defeats the purpose of having a voluptuous actress if she isn’t going to even get down to lingerie or a swimsuit.  Anyhow.  She does add considerably to the entertainment value of the film, so overall I’d say her presence is more enjoyable than frustrating.  I suppose if we want mainstream actresses showing skin, there’s Game of Thrones, though none of the women therein can boast such figures as Hayek or Hendricks. 

While I'm on the topic of "fake sex in movies" - though "Game of Thrones" is not a movie - there was a recent film with Jason "Ted Lasso" Sudeikis and Alison "Annie from Community" Brie called "Sleeping With Other People".  It's a fairly raunchy film with several scenes of simulated sex (always avoid alliteration).  The characters involved are partly nude, but no amount of suspension of disbelief will convince us that mainstream actors are actually having sex on camera for a film.  So it's a bit weird.  Having said so, having seen Alison Brie as semi-innocent in "Community", and Jason Sudeikis kind of too clueless to be a stud in "Ted Lasso", seeing them both take overtly provocative roles like this is a bit of a novelty.   I suppose your mileage may vary.

Will there be a third movie?  Actually, I’m still waiting for “Deadpool 3”[ Deadpool 3 release date, trailer, cast and more | The Digital Fix], which presumably would keep Reynolds busy to the exclusion of Hitman’s Bodyguard’s Wife’s Gynecologist.   We’ll see. 

Ragtime

I had meant to review these earlier, but criticizing Trump and waxing poetic about the virtues of the AR15 (yet again) took precedence.  

This was a novel, by E.L. Doctorow, in 1975, followed by a movie in 1981.

Two issues I want to address before I go into both.

Book vs. Movie.   How many times have you heard someone remark, when asked if they read a book, “I saw the movie” or “I’ll wait for the movie”?  Probably multiple times.  Unless the novel has been drawn out to a multi-episode miniseries, chances are you can watch a 90-120 minute movie much quicker than reading the novel.  None of us are getting any younger, so I suppose the time element could be a justification to forgo reading the book.

However, books give us certain benefits.  Characters' subjective impressions and thoughts – these don’t translate well into film.  Sex and nudity – you can go to town here on paper, to an extent which would render the film pornographic if faithfully adapted to the screen.  And sci-fi can go all over the place, to an extent which might be prohibitively expensive to translate onto the screen. 

Madison Square Garden.  What attracted me to Ragtime was the shooting of Stanford White by the jealous Harry Shaw at Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906.  My father, a proud New Yorker (although from Brooklyn), told me that there were no less than FOUR different “Madison Square Gardens”.

V1.       1879-1890 at the actual Madison Square in Manhattan.  That’s named after James Madison (P4, 1808-1816) and located at Fifth Avenue and Broadway at Twenty-Third Street. 

V2.       1890-1925.  At the same location.  This is where the Shaw-White shooting took place in 1906.

V3.       1925-1968.  At Eighth Ave. between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Street, now the site of One Worldwide Plaza.

V4.       1968-present.  The current venue, where the Knicks and Rangers play, and concerts are held here.  It took over Penn Station, which is now completely underground.  I caught a season 4 episode of “Boardwalk Empire” where Nucky Thompson winds up in the above-ground Penn Station.  My sole experience at the current MSG was seeing AC/DC there in August 1988 with my brother.  We managed to snag fifth row seats from the box office just days before the show, probably because no one was particularly impressed with their current album, Blow Up Your Video, which truly stank.  Fortunately for AC/DC fans, the band is well aware that their later material stinks, and live you can expect the set to be mostly split between Bon Scott material and Back In Black songs, with just a handful of other songs.  Anyhow. 

Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow.  It was published in 1975, and Doctorow himself was born in 1931, so he has no firsthand knowledge of New Rochelle, NY, or of Manhattan, in the early 1900s.   The peculiar charm of the novel is that it blends a fictional family in New Rochelle, NY – the part of NY right before you hit Connecticut on I-95 after leaving NYC – with historical characters.  Moreover, the novel goes off in various tangents concerning the historical characters, leaving the fictional characters to be returned to later.  The novel’s various tangents were highly entertaining, so much so that reading it, in addition to watching the movie, was well worthwhile.  For example, Harry Houdini shows up early on, then Sigmund Freud & Carl Jung, then famous anarchist Emma Goldman, JP Morgan and Henry Ford, etc., with actress Evelyn Nesbit the most prominent historical character, winding up in a romantic relationship with fictional Younger Brother.

Ragtime (DVD).    I read about the Shaw-White shooting a few months ago, discovered this movie has it, put it on my Netflix queue (not available for sale on DVD for a cheap price) and by the time it finally arrived I had forgotten why I put it on my queue.  Elizabeth McGovern, nowadays the American Mom on “Downton Abbey”, is much younger, playing Evelyn Nesbit, the Gibson girl of the Art Nouveau era.  Part of the film deals with her, her jealous husband Shaw who winds up in a murder trial, and the Younger Brother (Brad Dourif) who has a crush on her.  Mind you, she shows up completely nude (!).  The rest of the film covers a black guy, Coalhouse Walker (Howard E. Rollins), a jazz musician fortunate enough to own a Model T.  Driving through New Rochelle, the local fire department blocks him off and dumps horse shit on his car.  Eventually Walker assembles a team of confederates – including Dourif’s character in blackface – in hoods, brandishing Springfield rifles, and takes the Pierpont Morgan Library hostage.  Relative to the novel, the film sticks to the narrative concerning the fictional family and ignores the tangents concerning historical characters.

The cast is remarkable.   I wasn’t able to recognize James Cagney as Police Commissioner Waldo, but I did recognize Dourif, McGovern, Jeff Daniels as a New Rochelle cop, Fran Drescher ("The Nanny") as a Jewish woman fighting with her husband in the Jewish neighborhood of NYC, John Ratzenberger as the cop who arrests Shaw after the shooting, and Samuel L. Jackson as one of Walker’s gang members.  This alone should make the film worth watching, but as noted above, I found the novel complements the film and makes enjoying both to be worth the effort.