Michael Bryce Sr. is the secondary antagonist of the 2021 comedy film Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard.
He was played by Morgan Freeman.
Biography[]
A legendary former bodyguard, Michael Bryce Sr is the non-biological father of Michael Bryce Jr, who idolised him from an early age. However, after the junior Bryce lost his bodyguarding licence after his client was assassinated, he avoided Senior, who spent most of his days in his Tuscany villa. At some point, Senior got hired as Greek nationalist billionaire Aristotle Papadopoulos' head of security and either turned a blind eye to or aided him in his plan to shut off Europe's power grid, which would have resulted in catastrophic crashes and explosions across the continent.
After getting involved in an Interpol operation to stop Papadopoulos' scheme, Bryce reluctantly goes to Senior's villa to ask for help, accompanied by assassin lovebirds Darius and Sonia Kincaid. Senior greets him warmly, but snidely mocks him during dinner for using a penknife rather than a gun and for wearing Kevlar, which he says real bodyguards don't do. Senior triggers Bryce's trauma by serving gelato, and when Bryce leaves in shock, Senior explains to the Kincaids that gelato is tangentially connected to Bryce's mother's death; he happened to be choosing what gelato to buy when his mother was knocked into a fairground ride and killed at an amusement park. Senior sends Bryce and the Kincaids off to a safehouse in his Jaguar and promises to restore his bodyguarding licence by speaking to the review board. However, Senior secretly alerts Papadopoulos to Bryce and the couple's presence and they are captured and brought to the Papadopoulos' mansion.
Darius and Bryce escape, but Sonia seemingly falls back in love with Papadopoulos, who is revealed to be her old flame, and abandons them. Darius storms off and when Bryce goes back to Senior for help, Senior reveals his betrayal and cruelly belittles Bryce as a stain on his legacy, tells him that he got the bodyguard agency to blacklist Bryce and says that Bryce's mother was "intensely social". Enraged, Bryce destroys his stepfather's Jaguar and steals from a gelato shop before going over to a bar to speak to Darius, who then learns that Sonia was playing Papadopoulos.
Papadopoulos finds out of Sonia's betrayal and sets off to the Tyrrhenian Sea with his best men, Senior included, where he drills into the European central data grid, planning to infect it with a virus and then drown Sonia. Bryce and Kincaid return and kill his men and Bryce eventually holds Papadopoulos at gunpoint, whereupon Senior arrives, promising to restore his bodyguarding licence if he gives Kincaid up and joins him and Papadopoulos.
Bryce rejects his offer and shoots at Papadopoulos, but Senior jumps in front of the bullet. Horrified, Bryce runs to Senior, who reveals he's wearing Kevlar and kicks his son through a door and down a staircase to the central room. Bryce and Senior engage in a gunfight and Bryce plunges a penknife into his father's neck. Impressed by Bryce's manuever, Senior reveals that the manual override on the virus will rig the boat to explode before bleeding to death. Bryce overrides the virus at the very last second and just barely escapes the explosion, which incinerates Senior's corpse.