Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

The Hitman’s Bodyguard

(2017)

Every once in a while a movie comes along where I just hate everything about it. This is one of them. It is loud, stupid, it wants to be funny and it isn’t. It is ultra-ultra-violent. And yes, I know this is meant to be comedy violence, no more to be taken seriously than a Tom and Jerry animated cartoon … but I couldn’t help it. It was too much, too motherfucking much.

Which takes me to the performance of Samuel L. Jackson, a motherfucker I usually enjoy (though he makes a lot of terrible motherfucking paycheck movies, like Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane). I know this is how it was scripted, but I don’t think the motherfucker uttered a single sentence in the motherfucking movie that didn’t have the word motherfucker in it. Now, I am the last motherfucking person in the world who wants to censor language … but it just got so motherfucking boring. It made him look stupid, not “street,” which I guess was the motherfucking intention. Now, Jackson used that word a lot in Pulp Fiction, too, but Pulp Fiction was a motherfucking masterpiece and the character of Jules was a masterpiece of performing. The only “piece” I can think of to describe this movie is “motherfucking piece of shit.”

See how monotonous, boring, and stupid it can get?

Incidentally, I’ve grown used to a long, long list of producers, executive producers, and gofer-getting-coffee producers, but I think this one sets a record. I counted no less than 31 producers of various stripes. By the time those people split up the profits, they’d each be getting about $1.98. And they didn’t even deserve that much. Back in the day, a film had one producer, and sometimes, like in the case of Irving Thalberg, he wasn’t even in the credits.