The Hitman's Bodyguard

Patrick Hughes’s 2017 film follows a bodyguard ordered to get a hitman to a war crimes trial in The Hague on a deadline, with bad blood between them. The seam in its tone has a documented cause. Tom O’Connor’s script reached the 2011 Black List of unproduced screenplays as a straight drama, then became a comedy in a frantic two week rewrite just before shooting. What remains is a thriller skeleton wearing improvised banter: the murdered family, the war crimes case and the countdown still carry the weight, while the lines come from another film. Stunt coordinator Greg Powell says the canal chase used no computer effects and that the speed on screen is the real speed of the boat, the bike and the cars. None of the court is actually in The Hague: the exterior is Sofia’s Bulgarian National Bank, the round chamber is Harrow Civic Centre in west London, the corridors Freemasons Hall in Covent Garden. Sofia also doubles for the Belarus countryside, the ambushed London street and the Rijksmuseum clock tower floor. A good fit if you count the chase being genuinely driven at speed rather than assembled as the money on screen. Not for you if a murdered family and improvised bickering in one scene reads as a film that never decided what it was.