Posted By Dave Howlett on February 7, 2013

Bullet To The Head is such a generic, forgettable action movie that, while watching it, you sometimes forget that you’re seeing it in a bona fide movie theatre; you could just as easily be on your couch watching a TV movie made for the Spike channel. The script is derivative, the characters are dull, and the action is uninspired. This in itself wouldn’t necessarily be a crime, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s also the first-ever teaming of two genuine action icons—star Sylvester Stallone and director Walter Hill (The Warriors, The Driver, The Long Riders). Then it just becomes depressing.

Based on a 2008 graphic novel by Matz and Colin Wilson (released in North America in 2010 by Dynamite Publishing), Bullet To The Head stars Stallone as Jimmy Bobo, one half of a New Orleans hitman duo assigned to kill a disgraced D.C. cop in his hotel room. Almost immediately afterwards, Jimmy’s partner (Jon Seda) is murdered, and Jimmy narrowly escapes the same fate. Someone is cutting all ties to the crooked cop’s death, which somehow ties into a complex real estate swindle masterminded by a sleazy lawyer (Christian Slater) and a corrupt businessman (Lost’s Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). Jimmy teams up with an arrow-straight police officer (Sung Kang) to bring the bad guys to justice, attempting to reconcile with his estranged tattoo-artist daughter (Sarah Shahi) along the way.

Walter Hill is famous for unlikely team-ups rife with personality, race, and culture clashes in films like 48 Hours and Red Heat, and he tries for some of the same I-don’t-like-you-you-don’t-like-me-but-we-gotta-work-together tension in Bullet To The Head. It’s a losing game; Kang’s cop character comes off as incredibly naïve (he is continually shocked and horrified when Bobo, a hired killer, actually kills people), and Stallone, riffing on his grumpy-bear persona from the Expendables films and the 2008 Rambo reboot, acts like he’s never seen a cellphone before (or a Korean, for that matter). All of the characters are stereotypical to the point of near-parody. The only one who leaves an impression, a hulking hitman played by Jason Momoa (Game Of Thrones) is also thinly drawn, but the murderous glee he brings to the film’s concluding axe-duel makes you wish the movie had been about him instead. Bullet To The Head tries to make a case for Stallone and Hill as elder statesmen of the action genre, but it just leaves you wishing they’d both ridden off into the sunset years ago.

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Categories: Movies, Reviews
Tags: 48 Hours, action movies, Adewale Akkinuoye-Agbaje, Christian Slater, Colin Wilson, Dynamite Publishing, graphic novel adaptations, Matz, Rambo, Red Heat, Sarah Shahi, Sung Kang, Sylvester Stallone, The Driver, The Expendables, The Long Riders, The Warriors, Walter Hill