Given his status as a living legend of the industry, there surely can’t be too many things that Morgan Freeman has left to accomplish. He’s won almost every major award under the sun including an Oscar and the Cecil B. DeMille trophy from the Golden Globes for outstanding contributions to cinema, he’s got over 130 credits to his name ranging from hard-hitting dramas and box office smash hits to action movies and all-time greats, so almost every box has been ticked.
However, even at the sprightly age of 84, Freeman broke new ground when he lent support to Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson and Salma Hayek in buddy sequel Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. Although he’s lent his talents to Gerard Butler’s Fallen series, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Unforgiven, Hard Rain, the Dark Knight trilogy, RED, the Ben-Hur remake and many more, he’s never engaged in close quarters hand-to-hand combat onscreen before.
Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is far from a great movie, but it does provide several fleeting moments of enjoyment, not least of all when Ryan Reynolds gets his ass handed to him by Freeman’s Senior. In a recent interview, The Shawshank Redemption star admitted that it was always something he’d wanted to do, but he’d never been afforded the opportunity.
“I was watching a John Wayne film and they had one obligatory saloon-type brawl where everybody was throwing punches. I thought, ‘How long did it take them to do that?’. Because each one is a setup. But I never had the occasion to do it before. So, it was a first for me.”
Sylvester Stallone is less than ten years younger than Freeman and he’s still churning out fast-paced actioners on a regular basis, although it might be a little much asking the veteran to go full Liam Neeson in Taken and reinvent himself as a grizzled badass, although hearing him drop a one-liner or ten in those silken tones of his would definitely be worth the price of admission and then some.
