Bullet to the Head
English (A) ¬¬
Director: Walter Hill
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Momoa and Sung Kang
There comes a time in every action star's career when he must choose to continue with the genre and risking coming off as a steroid-consuming geriatric, or take the plunge into more mature roles.
Sylvester Stallone's moment came in 1997, when he appeared in the star-studded police procedural Copland, trading in his muscles for a fattened paunch; his steeled glare for the puppy-dog eyes of an underestimated and underappreciated small-town sheriff.
His performance was ground-breaking, not just because he showed that he could act with the best of them, including Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, but that he could best them in technique if needed. Since then, he mysteriously fell out of the moving picture business until a return in 2008 to big-budget, low-intelligence blockbusters, marked by familiar mountainous biceps, snappy one-liners and a massive body-count.
His long absence is best explained byStallone himself: No one wanted to hire him for tough guy-roles after Copland — as if that is really such a bad thing. Instead, Stallone has come back to what does best, being a one-man killing machine who vanquishes evil at the point of a gun.
His latest film, Bullet to the Head, reexamines those tired hags of the gangster genre, betrayal and violent redemption — motifs well-suited to veteran director Walter Hill's style of film-making.After all, Hill is the man who brought us ultra-gory epics such as 48 hours (1982), Extreme Prejudice (1987), and Last Man Standing (1996).
In Bullet to the Head, Stallone's Jimmy Bobo is the bigger half of a two-man assassination team betrayed and marked for death by a seedy New Orleans real-estate baron. He is forced to team up an idealistic out-of-town police officer to solve the mystery behind the death of Bobo's partner and a blackmailing ex-policeman.
The film works on tenuous leads and its attempt to establish rapport between Bobo and his erstwhile sidekick, Detective Taylor Kwon (who is of Korean ancestry, allowing for many "Asian" jokes), feels inadequate.
The film ultimately falls apart on shaky plotting, lack of chemistry and just about every accusation you can throw at it. In many ways, it is a grand homage to Stallone's career and that of Hill's finest moments as a director. It is also a reminder that their best work looks to be behind them.
Don't be silly and take your kids to see this. The filmmakers have taken the premise of their title too far, and audiences will leave the theatre just a little ashen and just a little nauseous.