Starring Ryan Reynolds. Rated 14A

If Deadpool was revamped as a buddy comedy, the movie would look a whole lot like The Hitman’s Bodyguard—and that’s by no means a bad thing. With a slick script and a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek wit, filmmaker Patrick Hughes (The Expendables 3) appears to have co-opted the best elements of lead Ryan Reynolds’s Marvel smash, injecting a sly humour into the movie’s stunt-heavy gunfights and barbed banter between the protagonists.

Starring as an eye-twitching contract killer with a steadfast love of his insult-slinging wife, Samuel L. Jackson cuts a grizzled yet likable figure as Darius Kincaid. Reynolds is his partner, Michael Bryce, a safety-conscious control freak who, despite spending his days as a bodyguard for high-profile targets, is terrified of risk. Burning through a whirlwind of cities in choreographed car chases—London, a Belarusian village, the Hague, Manchester, and Amsterdam all appear within the first half hour—the duo pitch their roles perfectly, with an on-screen chemistry that is sometimes endearing and often laugh-out-loud funny.

The movie’s flatter moments appear when the director dives too deep or relies on shallow clichés. Hughes’s attempts to broach questions of morality—“Who is more wicked: he who kills evil motherfuckers, or he who protects them?” Jackson asks at the film’s midway point—deserve to be sketched out in more detail or cut from the story line. The clunky action-movie tropes of the eastern European villain (Gary Oldman) and the one-second-to-go deadline, too, miss an opportunity to be treated with the same dry comedy as the movie’s more sophisticated jokes. And, for all their breakneck energy, some of the stunts come off as a little commonplace.

Nevertheless, The Hitman’s Bodyguard is a high-paced romp that touches all the bases of an odd-couple chase movie: generous explosions, high-speed mayhem, and excellently played, tangled love interests. For that, moviegoers can thank Salma Hayek (Frida), whose prison-dwelling Sonia Kincaid, wife of Darius, has a mouth like a sewer and carries much of the movie’s supporting comedy. High art this is not, but as summer movies about lethal frenemies go, Hughes’s film is suitably entertaining.