Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard (2021)

Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard arrives as the second installment in a franchise whose central proposition is that three famous people shouting at each other in sunny European locations constitutes entertainment. It is a loud film. It is also, from a cultural standpoint, remarkably inert. The apparatus of modern social consciousness, which by 2021 had been thoroughly installed across the studio landscape, is almost entirely absent here. What we get instead is a machine for generating car chases, and the machine works poorly.

The ensemble is diverse in the manner of a casting director's shortlist, with Samuel L. Jackson, Salma Hayek, Antonio Banderas and Morgan Freeman filling out the ranks. None of this carries thematic weight. Salma Hayek's Sonia is a volatile con artist who drives the plot, brandishing firearms and profanity in roughly equal measure, though she functions as a comedic femme fatale and not as the bearer of any argument about gender. Antonio Banderas plays a Greek shipping billionaire who wants to wreck the European power grid. He is rich, therefore he is the villain. The film never bothers to construct a critique of wealth. It simply reaches for the nearest available antagonist and hands him a yacht.

The rest is silence. No LGBTQ characters, no racial commentary, no climate anxiety, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent representation, no revisionist history, no sermons of any kind. This is a film that preaches nothing because it has nothing to say. It opened at number one and still lost money, which feels less like justice and more like arithmetic.