Much in the same way that I have always wondered who delivers mail to mailmen (if they live in their own district, are they allowed to deliver mail to themselves? Is that a conflict of interest?), the writers of the new action-comedy The Hitman’s Bodyguard ponder who a career killer goes to when he finds himself a mark. Even professional assassins need a little muscle from time to time, and when one especially ill-tempered sonuvagun hires a body guard with a short fuse, violent egos clash with nose-crushing results.

That’s the long and short of the new Samuel L. JacksonRyan Reynolds vehicle, the trailer for which surfaced yesterday. Jackson plays a mercenary who runs afoul of a brutal Eastern European crime lord, and soon finds every gun in town out for his blood. He needs protection, so he gets the best in the business — his personal nemesis, Reynolds’ body man, who has quashed Jackson’s assassinations on plenty of occasions before. They have to figure out how to get along if they want to live through the week, bonding over boat chases, bantering, and a whole lot of four-letter words.

The red-band teaser contains a great deal of cusses, which leaves me feeling ambivalent. On the one hand, when a movie resorts to cursing too frequently, it starts to lose its sense of wit and slip into easy potty-mouthery. On the other hand, nobody in the world says the word “motherf–ker” quite like Samuel L. Jackson. To put it in Sorkinese: “If you haven’t heard Sam Jackson say the word ‘motherf–ker,’ you haven’t seen Shakespeare as it was meant to be done.”

The Hitman’s Bodyguard comes to theaters August 18.

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