Had the stars aligned correctly, Walter Hill and Sylvester Stallone — those giants of ’70s/’80s action cinema — might already have worked together. For both 48 Hrs. and The Driver, Hill came a-knocking, but Stallone passed on both. Sadly, their eventual pairing on Bullet To The Head is so thuddingly average that you might spend half of its running time wistfully thinking of what might have been and the other half giving thanks that it didn’t happen.
This is an unabashed buddy action flick, with Stallone’s ageing hitman, Jimmy Bobo, teaming up with Sung Kang’s straight-arrow cop to hunt down the blah blah blah who’s involved with something about property development. We’re not being glib — the plot is almost totally irrelevant. Corrupt cops, slimy lawyers (Christian Slater in a pity-making, agent-sacking tour de force), unstoppable killers (Jason Momoa, bouncing back from Conan with a nicely nasty turn) and Bobo’s daughter, just ripe for a late-in-the-day kidnapping — we’ve done this dance a dirty dozen times.
So, apart from some weird structural tics (it starts in the middle, a Tarantino tribute ten years too late, with a Stallone voiceover that suggests a fair amount of fixing in post), what we need to set this apart from the pack is a neat seam of wry humour and inventive violence. It doesn’t really deliver on either count — the banter between Stallone and Kang is first-base, and although the title is justified by an astounding number of brain-splats, the violence is perfunctorily staged and lacking in oomph.
Thank God for Stallone, then. With Kang, surprisingly, leaving his Fast Five charisma in the garage, Sly is the best thing about the whole shebang, making the punching and shooting look effortless, while the voice — now so rumbly it could blow a subwoofer at 100 paces — makes even the worst dialogue sound like it’s been in the pan for three minutes. But this is not classic Stallone, and it’s far from classic Hill — the menace and tension that the great director captured in movies like The Warriors, Southern Comfort and 48 Hrs. is sadly missing here. It doesn’t even hit the heights of Red Heat — and when you’re crying out for Jim Belushi to enliven proceedings, something’s seriously awry.
