Bullet to the Head review: Slick Stallone is bang on target

By Chris Tookey

PUBLISHED: 20:58 EST, 31 January 2013 | UPDATED: 20:58 EST, 31 January 2013

BULLET TO THE HEAD (15)

Verdict: Entertaining comeback by Walter Hill
Rating: 3 Star Rating


This action film based on a graphic novel is violent, at times morally reprehensible and a guilty pleasure — Sylvester Stallone's most entertaining movie in many years.

Walter Hill, now 71, is one of the great action directors, and his best movies include The Warriors, Southern Comfort and 48 Hrs.

He's also been responsible as a producer for such achievements as Alien and the TV western series, Deadwood.

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Guilty pleasure: Sylvester Stallone plays musclebound hit-man Jimmy Bobo in Walter Hill's latest film

Guilty pleasure: Sylvester Stallone plays musclebound hit-man Jimmy Bobo in Walter Hill's latest film

Several of his less well-known films, notably Geronimo: An American Legend, though a little too intelligent for their own commercial good, deserve re-evaluation.

Bullet To The Head, his first film for the big screen in more than a decade, is extremely professional and consistently watchable. In terms of slick editing and narrative energy, Hill can still teach younger directors a lesson or two.

Stallone plays Jimmy Bobo, a muscle-bound hit-man, who teams up with a Korean-American cop (Sung Kang) to track down the crooks who murdered their respective partners.

It's yet another mismatched buddy movie, with the naïve but morally upstanding young cop — the moral centre of the movie but definitely not its star — consistently outsmarted by his older, less scrupulous amigo. The combo works well, with some zippy one-liners coming from Stallone's curiously contorted mouth.

Words, of course, play second fiddle to action. Indeed, when the principal bad guy embarks on a lengthy speech of self-justification at the end, Stallone snarls: 'Are we gonna fight or are you gonna try and bore me to death?'

Ax-tion filled flick: Sylvester Stallone goes up against Game of Thrones star Jason Momoa armed with axes in Bullet to the Head

Axe-tion filled flick: Sylvester Stallone goes up against Game of Thrones star Jason Momoa armed with axes in Bullet to the Head

Despite those pithy one-liners, the Italian screenwriter Alessandro Camon won't win prizes for originality, and one-time star Christian Slater — playing a sleazy lawyer who might as well have 'Kill me' tattooed on his head — has to deliver several unspeakable lines of crass exposition.

When he, like almost everyone else in the movie, ends up modelling a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, it almost ranks as a mercy killing.

The film is in many ways a throwback to the heyday of Stallone, Willis and Schwarzenegger in the Eighties, though the soundtrack has echoes of even further back, with harmonica solos that could have come off the sixties LP Five Live Yardbirds.

It is stupendously violent, with more people shot in the face than in any film I can remember, but the action moves along at a fine clip, and there's a superbly choreographed final axe-fight.

Hyde Park On Hudson would have been a lot more entertaining if Laura Linney and Bill Murray could only have settled their differences with a good, climactic axe-fight.

Mr Hill is even keener than usual to show as much gore as possible, doubtless egged on by producer Joel Silver, who gave us the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series.

The level of bloodshed evokes memories of Sam Peckinpah, but this is recognizably a Walter Hill film. The movie is not about its manifestly preposterous plot, which makes the average Jackie Chan movie look like The King's Speech.

Despite its amoral stance, the film is about the rivalry between the two central characters' moral codes.

Hill has always been interested in loners with ethics that differ from the norm.

The key moment comes when Stallone's character shoots yet another person in the head, and his cop buddy protests. And Stallone says: 'At least I shot him quickly and put him out of his misery. Most of the people I know would do it slow, to get even.'

Like Martin Scorsese, Walter Hill suffered terribly from asthma as a child and therefore became an admiring observer of action rather than a perspiring perpetrator of it.

Also like Scorsese, Hill has long been fascinated by the conflict between public and private morality. Like its main protagonist, Bullet is beefy and aggressive, but not as brainless as it looks.

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