What if I told you a story about these two buddies who are secret agents and go around the world protecting people, getting into exciting adventures and meeting interesting people who pay them millions of dollars?

What if I told you about this movie where a black guy and a white guy live exciting lives as assassins and roam the streets of Paris and London, meeting gorgeous women, and then taking a month off to chase George Clooney on the isle of Capri, where they meet Salma Hayek who runs a movie company and gives them both jobs?

What if I told you that a big movie is running at Flagship Theaters, where Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds … are daring bank robbers who break into a vault in Rotterdam and steal all of Trump’s hidden money and give it to the Democratic National Committee?

Boy, that would be fun, but it sure ain’t happening in this movie. So let’s start again.

“The Hitman’s Bodyguard”

This disaster was directed by Patrick Hughes and written by Tom O’Connor who wrote one other movie.

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The story is about Michael, (Ryan Reynolds) a well-dressed private security agent who lives in a fabulous home. Michael goes to work one morning getting a high level Japanese billionaire named Kurosawa (LOL) onto his private jet safely.

In THIS movie, There will be six or seven more attempts on the way to the private plane. Mind you, I’m estimating the number of all of these attempts because they moved so fast, one can’t be clear.

Finally, Michael gets him to the plane safely, and when the client waves goodbye to him, a bullet smashes into the window and the client is killed. I got up to go, but there was more.

FLASH AHEAD: Michael is now disgraced and brought down to living out of his car and urinating into a bottle. The world of security no longer has a room for Michael. It seems no one — not even Macy’s, which has its own problems — would hire him to sell shirts.

But wait. Someone does. A shadowy high level group of folks have an impossible job. They need a loser, so they start with their first loser, Michael.

Michael is chosen to transport Darius, (Samuel L. Jackson) the best, most famous assassin in the world, now out of luck and incarcerated in a supremely high level prison, to the Hague to testify against the president of Belarus (Gary Oldman).

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We’re told that Darius witnessed crimes against humanity. We get to see mass killings, a wife and baby murdered in cold blood and view the mass graves of this president whose name is, and I’m only going to write this once, so get a pencil and jot it down, Vladislav Dukhovich! Got it?

Of course Vlad the impaler has his own leg breakers, a whole nation of them, at his fingertips, whom he sends to kill Darius.

From this point on, there will be, still estimating mind you, hundreds of bad guys in hundreds of attempts to kill somebody, anybody. Hundreds of exploding cars, car and motorcycle chases, firefights, gruesome torture scenes and inexplicable bar fights, full of throat cuttings and humans set ablaze abound.

Here’s the cast: Gary Oldman, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Nadia Konakchieva, Valentin Stojanov, Ralitsa Vassileva, Joaquim de Almeida, Salma Hayek (Wait, really? Yes, really) and Nicolas de Pruyssenaere who plays a Dutch cop. Is anyone looking into Russia’s involvement in this casting? Is there evidence of collusion? Somebody call Bob Mueller.

I regret to say that Julia Roberts does not appear in this movie, and boy, did I miss her. Yes, “Dunkirk” is still playing.

J.P. Devine, of Waterville, is a former stage and film actor.


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