Review of the film by Thomas Vincent “My Wife is a Hitman”

Tom Vincent’s crime comedy “My Wife is a Hitman” (Role Play) was released, starring Kaley Cuoco, known for her role in the TV series “The Big Bang Theory.” It turned out to be a funny but unpretentious film, more suitable for watching on the couch than in the cinema, he believes Julia Shagelman.

The marriage of Emma (Kaley Cuoco) and Dave (David Oyelowo) looks quite prosperous from the outside: a house in the suburbs, a couple of lovely kids (Regan Bryan-Gudgeon and Lucia Eliu) and feelings for each other that have not cooled down after seven years of marriage. But they also did not escape the everyday routine familiar to many married couples, which slightly cooled the romantic impulses. Emma works too much and often goes on business trips, leaving the children and household chores to Dave, because of this they do not have much time for each other. And having returned from another trip, she realizes with horror that she forgot about her wedding anniversary, unlike her husband and children, who prepared a pleasant surprise for her.

This is not such a terrible offense for a working mother of two children, but Emma feels guilty and wants to make amends for it, for which she invites Dave to spend the evening just the two of them. They will go into town, meet “by chance” in a luxury hotel bar as strangers, and thus bring freshness back into the relationship. So, what could possibly go wrong here? But Dave is late for the date, and in his absence a gentleman with noble gray hair (Bill Nighy) begins to approach Emma, ​​behaving more and more intrusively.

Unlike the simple-minded Dave, viewers already know that Emma is not the first to pretend to be someone else: even in the first frames, she cleverly changes her appearance with the help of a wig and makeup in the airport toilet. And she actually flew not to another state to conduct a seminar for middle managers, but to Argentina to kill some union leader there. Because in fact, Emma’s name is Anna, she is a hired killer, and the role of a mom from the suburbs is her cover. True, she really loves her husband and children, so after the Argentine order she wants to give up her dangerous profession and constant travel. But, as usually happens in such films, they won’t let her do it so easily. So the annoying gentleman in the bar, of course, turns out to be a colleague/competitor who is not averse to taking the reward announced for Anna/Emma’s head.

“My Wife is a Hitman” is a cheerful, at least until the halfway point of its compact 100-minute running time, a hybrid of a romantic comedy and an action film. This, of course, is not the first attempt to cross these genres: when watching, I remember both brilliant examples like James Cameron’s True Lies (1994) or Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), as well as less successful ones, for example, Unanswered ” by Dexter Fletcher, released this spring on Apple TV+. With the latter, the film by Thomas Vincent, who once participated with his film “Carnival” (1999) at the Berlin Film Festival, and now shoots mainly TV series, has much more in common. This is more of a pass-through craft, which in most countries will appear immediately on streaming (in this case, Amazon Prime Video). And only in the empty Russian box office is this now a rare example of a Hollywood film with stars, albeit more of a second series, released a month before the premiere on the network.

On the big screen this picture is really too spacious. There are no large-scale action scenes here, and the authors can only dream of Apple budgets. Therefore, the heroes will have only one modest chase in Berlin, and the final scene will be played out in an empty mansion and the sparse forest surrounding it with the participation of at most half a dozen extras portraying mercenaries of a powerful syndicate of killers (its head is played by Connie Nielsen, whose physical form can only be envied) .

The comedic component prevails here, also thanks to the truly well-chosen acting duet. Kaley Cuoco, who played the (not so) airheaded blonde Penny on The Big Bang Theory for twelve years, now often chooses “bad girl” roles, such as in the series “The Flight Attendant” (2020-2022) or “Based on a True Story” “, the first season of which was released this year, and she is doing great with them. And David Oyelowo looks convincing in the role of the mattress-husband, shocked by the truth revealed to him about his beloved wife, but remaining devoted to her, no matter what. The main task of humanizing this couple falls on him: it’s still not easy to sympathize with a cold-blooded killer with a rather carelessly sketched backstory by the authors, even in a comedy. But you can sympathize with the handsome dad, who happily allows his wife to steer the family boat.