The Hitman's Bodyguard

The Hitman’s Bodyguard draws on the classic romantic comedy plot where two bickering opposites discover harmony in each other. 

That was familiar safe even back when Shakespeare unleashed Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (circa 1598; wow, even before TV). Antagonists become lovers. Or at least adequate room-mates, e.g. all The Odd Couples.

Hitman Kincaid kills the famous and ace security agent Bryce protects them. That makes them opposites, with Bryce apparently enjoying the moral superiority. 

They have a violent history, with complications. Kincaid accidentally wounded Bryce in one assignment. When Kincaid stumbled into another target and scored a miraculous hit on a Japanese drug-dealer, he unwittingly ruined Bryce’s confidence and career. Also his love-life, because Bryce assumed the killing of his client was due to his lover Amelia’s betrayal.  

In this narrative Amelia —  an Interpol officer— coerces Bryce into guarding the notorious Kincaid to ensure his testimony against a Russian crime boss at The Hague. Kincaid finds any security assistants an unnecessary encumbrance. He does better on his own. He survives all the massive assaults that eliminate his other guards. There are many.

Of course the two antagonists develop a respect and affection for each other. Indeed Kincaid acknowledges his unwanted partner’s effectiveness. He also helps Bryce win back Amelia, first by unheeded counsel, then by persuading her. Kincaid dangerously pauses his own mission to save the captured Bruce from torture. 

So the mercenary serial killer has a heart.  He even his own romantic weak spot, the wild Sonia, who has been jailed as a trap for Kincaid. Only to secure her release does he agree to testify. 

Both women are strong. Amelia fights off an attack by her boss, the Russian mole. Kincaid meets Sonia when she wins a (co-ed) Mexican bar fight. She is best defined later, when she sits in the serenity of the Lotus position while spewing obscenities at Kincaid’s absence and at the men responsible for it. Sonia is so dominant her larger cell-mate cowers in the corner whenever commanded. 

Both men are given the strong women to assure the viewer that there’s nothing effeminate in their bromance. America’s penchant for tightly-bonded male heroes often suggests a suppressed homosexual relationship, from Tom and Huck down to Starsky and Hutch, Butch and Sundance, etc., etc. They’re given at least one hetero interest to absolve them. 

Kincaid’s virtue is telegraphed by the tattoo on his neck and arm. The image of crows departing a skeletal tree evokes his first kill. We see that tree and birds when the teen-age Kincaid murders the brute who killed Kincaid’s pastor father. That set Kincaid’s career path. 

The tattoo counteracts the Biblical mark of Cain, which brands the murderer as evil.  This contract killer snuffs only the evil, whom the supposed hero Bryce is paid to protect. The moral advantage has shifted. 
     This intelligent comic thriller has two driving energies. One is the virtually non-stop physical action, the chases and attacks. The other is the verbal intensity, comic, profane, often graphically poetic. Both advance the bonding of apparent but not true opposites.