This wretched action comedy stars Ryan Reynolds as a bodyguard entrusted with escorting an assassin (Samuel L Jackson) from Coventry to the Hague (!) to testify against the deposed Belarusian president (Gary Oldman, wearily dusting down his failsafe “eastern heavy” accent). Director Patrick Hughes seems to have just asked everyone involved to, you know, do the usual. Jackson gives badass, Salma Hayek gives Latina hellcat, Reynolds wears a look that suggests that someone has shoved their thumb very hard between his eyes.
The film’s one achievement is that it comprehensively discredits the concept of “comedy violence”: the body count in the first 20 minutes leaves little room for guffaws. You could programme a week-long festival of low-budget, Albanian, post-apocalypse drama (alas, no such genre exists, to my knowledge) and the cumulative result would be nowhere near as bleak.
