117 min | R | June 16, 2021 | Lionsgate
Michael Bryce gets pulled out of forced retirement to babysit a hitman and his even louder wife across Europe. A vain billionaire wants to torch the continent’s power grid, and Interpol thinks these three are the answer. The plot is just an excuse to point cameras at people screaming.
Michael Bryce loses his bodyguard license and gets dragged back into the field by Darius Kincaid and his wife Sonia. A Greek billionaire plots to crash the European power grid out of nationalist grievance. Interpol needs the trio to stop him. The film is a chase comedy that mistakes volume for energy and treats every scene as a chance to scream a profanity. Underneath the running and shooting, it is about three people who hate each other being forced to cooperate, and it never finds a reason to make the audience care.
Ryan Reynolds plays Bryce as a wound-up neurotic on a forced sabbatical, narrating his own breakdown through therapy voiceover that runs the joke into the ground. Samuel L. Jackson plays Darius Kincaid as a man who solves every problem by shooting it and every conversation by insulting it. Salma Hayek plays Sonia as the loudest person in any room, and the script gives her one volume setting. The three actors have real timing, and they spend the movie talking over each other so the punchlines collide. Antonio Banderas plays Aristotle Papadopolous, the villain, as a preening aesthete who poses more than he schemes. Morgan Freeman turns up late as Senior and delivers his lines like he wandered in from a better film.
Patrick Hughes directs the action with cameras that never sit still and cuts that arrive before any shot can land. The boat chase and the Italian street pursuit dissolve into geography you cannot follow. Tom O’Connor, Brandon Murphy, and Phillip Murphy build the script around a single device, which is to have characters shout obscenities at full speed until the noise reads as comedy. The editing chops the banter so tight that jokes step on their own setups. The color grading bathes the Mediterranean locations in a glossy travel-brochure sheen that flattens every frame into the same bright nothing.
The movie runs on the assumption that the cast alone carries it, and it asks them to do the work without giving them anything to work with. Bryce wants his license back. Kincaid wants to be left alone. Sonia wants a baby. None of these threads connects to the plot in a way that matters, so the film keeps cutting back to explosions to fill the gap. The result is loud and frantic and weightless. It moves fast and goes nowhere.