Bullet To The Head: A Masterclass in Cliché

Sylvester Stallone is, of course, an action movie icon, with a long and illustrious history in the genre. It’s a shame, then, that his latest vehicle, Bullet to the Head–directed by Walter Hill and based on the French graphic novel Du Plomb Dans La Tete–has so little gas in its metaphorical tank.

Unfortunately, one of the fundamental issues with this film is its plot–which is derivative and predictable in the extreme, engendering déjà vu at every glaringly obvious turn. Stallone stars as James Bonomo (AKA Jimmy Bobo), a battle-hardened, muscle-bound contract killer raised on the streets. Jimmy is forced into an uneasy alliance with a snarky young detective named Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang) after a hit on a corrupt policeman results in the murder of Jimmy’s long-time partner-in-crime Louis (Jon Seda).

Thirsty for vengeance, Jimmy sets out to uncover why he and Louis were targeted by the same men who hired them. This quest leads him to cross paths with Detective Kwon and his rather more legally legitimate investigation. The pair agree to a precarious truce–exchanging all kinds of ridiculous banter–and together work their way up the low-life food chain, right into the upper echelons of the criminal underworld. And of course it emerges that ‘this goes way up–all the way to Washington,’ ‘they’re in over their heads,’ ‘they don’t know who they’re dealing with,’ ‘these guys are serious’ and (so many) other clichés.

The by-the-numbers plot and the cardboard cut-out villains might have been slightly easier to swallow if it weren’t for the fact that visually, the film also looks like a budget 1980s TV movie, complete with clunky burn-out transitions and a harmonica-laced, electric guitar soundtrack–at times I wondered whether it was supposed to be some kind of pastiche, or if it really was just that tacky. Sadly I think it’s the latter.

Another problem was the lack of real rapport between Jimmy and Detective Kwon. Although yes, there were some funny antagonistic exchanges between the characters, their ‘odd couple’ partnership ultimately lacked that essential germ of friendship and camaraderie that would have made the audience warm to the pairing.

It’s a tough balance to achieve when you have two characters with such opposing personalities and moral ideals, but when you get it right it works really well–just look at Will Smith opposite Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, or even opposite Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys, for example. In both of those films, you’ve got professional partners who annoy the hell out of each other, but there’s an underlying sense of friendship that’s already there (in the case of Bad Boys) or that steadily develops (in the case of Men in Black) which keeps you emotionally engaged. In Bullet to the Head, this was depressingly absent–and honestly, it’s just not that fun watching two people who don’t like each other bickering constantly for 90 minutes.

Having said all that, there are some moments of fun in this movie, and Stallone is undoubtedly the saving grace behind 99.99% of these moments. He plays Jimmy Bobo with a fantastic amount of swagger and wry charisma, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that his character gets all the best lines, delivered in his trademark lazy drawl, cajoling a few genuine laughs out of the audience. Stallone also deserves major credit for his physical prowess–there are some brutal hand-to-hand combat sequences that he handles masterfully, and at 66 years of age, that’s no mean feat.

Ironically enough, the film’s tagline is ‘Revenge never gets old’–almost as if the filmmakers are qualifying its total lack of originality. Unfortunately, in this particular case, it gets old pretty fast.