This is a buddy movie, a type of action comedy hugely popular before Hollywood moved on to men in Spandex.
There have been tweaks but the formula remains pretty stable. Two mismatched characters (one strait-laced, one reckless, and usually one black and one white) will team up for a time-restricted mission that involves some sort of road trip.
Along the way there will be car chases, shoot-outs and lots of salty bickering between the two leads.
At some point they will jump off a tall building, at least one of them will try to coin a catchphrase, and a mutual respect will develop in time for the big showdown with the foreign baddie played by a slumming-it British veteran.
After Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker flogged this dead horse to the bone with the Rush Hour movies, satire became the only road open for buddy films. But this isn’t Hot Fuzz or The Other Guys.
Director Patrick Hughes and writer Tom O’Connor (no, not him) stick mostly to the well-trodden path from the genre’s heyday.
The plot sees Ryan Reynolds’s uptight bodyguard given 24 hours to take Samuel L Jackson’s maverick assassin from England to The Hague to testify against Gary Oldman’s Eastern European war criminal.
Reynolds’s catchphrase is something to do with cars “smelling of ass”, Jackson jumps off the tower block first and the big set-piece is an overlong and fussily-edited boat chase.
This might have been enough for a great double act but Reynolds and Jackson don’t have a molecule of the chemistry of Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. And Turner & Hooch had better chat than this hapless pair, thanks to some shockingly unfunny dialogue.
Daily Express :: Entertainment Feed
