Director: Walter Hill
MPAA Rating: R
Film Pulse Score: 6/10
Bullet to the Head is a collaboration between three legends of 1980s action movies: Producer Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, producing here through his genre label ‘Dark Castle’), director Walter Hill (48 Hours, The Warriors) and frontman Sylvester Stallone, the 66-year old anchor of The Expendables franchise and once, a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the star of not only the Rocky and Rambo films but also such touchstone 80s bruiser classics as Cobra, Lock Up and Tango and Cash. It’s a shame this formidable triumvirate wasn’t given a better script. Everything works, except the story.
New Orleans hit man Jimmy Bobo (Stallone) and D.C. detective Taylor Kwan (Sung Kang) join forces when they learn both their partners were assassinated by the same laconic gun-for-hire, neanderthal thug Keegan (Jason Momoa). The reluctant partners go after Keegan’s boss Morel (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) with the help of Bobo’s daughter Lisa (Sarah Shahi) and a sleazy (is there any other kind in a movie like this?) lawyer named Baptiste who is played by the ageless, once very famous Christian Slater who drops into the action as if he had just tumbled from a time machine and then promptly disappears.
The first-half sort of works. We buy the unlikely partnership between cynical American killer and antsy Asian American policeman even though the buddy-cop device is as about as tired as Stallone looks. Somehow Sly works in the role of haunted survivor, his face frozen in a perpetual scowl. Game of Thrones’s Jason Momoa delivers an appropriately violent-yet- charismatic nemesis. But the story ultimately goes nowhere, losing itself in murky motives on the part of the bad guys and hard-to-follow dialogue with references to characters whose faces we can’t remember. The story seems more complex than it really is and by the time we get to the third act our attachment is severed by the confusion and we don’t care what happens. It seems that the moviemakers take themselves a bit too seriously. There’s not nearly enough humor and the reactionary macho posturing needs to be more tongue-in-cheek. This is retro-noir as opposed to neo-noir, a stubborn refusal to move with the times, to evolve.
Walter Hill hasn’t directed a movie in a while and it shows. You know it’s a Walter Hill movie because there’s a scene in a honky tonk bar with a loud live band led by a fiddler. The tropes are all present, including the end shoot-out at an abandoned building, but there’s none of the sass or inventive twists of a 48 Hours, leaving us something that just looks like an 80s classic but with none of the memorable content. It’s an empty experience, like eating McDonalds. It looks appealing but doesn’t taste so good.
The movie is an adaptation of French comic book Du Plomb Dans La Tete (‘Lead in the Head’) but it’s hard to see what potential the producers saw in this property which seems to get its cues from the very 1980s action movies Bullet to the Head is so eager to emulate. This is probably why the movie fails. It’s a remake of a remake.
