Stallone kind of riveting in clichéd, violent garbage

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Stallone (right) and Slater in Bullet to the Head. (CP)

WE'VE been here before. The Sylvester Stallone vehicle Bullet to the Head concludes with an axe fight featuring Stallone against his sneering, murderous adversary, played by Jason Momoa, going at it like maniacs in the bowels of an abandoned power plant, the sort of cavernous industrial space featured in a 100 different movies starring Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jason Statham. Or Vin Diesel. I believe it was also used by Scarlett Johansson in The Avengers.

Director Walter Hill, shooting his first theatrical feature in a decade, has been here before, and not just in spirit: Hard Times, one of Hill's best, made in 1975, contained a scene shot in the very same beat-up and abandoned New Orleans warehouse. The world is full of such buildings. They're a cliché. As is Bullet to the Head. It's junk, and it's excessively violent, which is a given. Approach it as a Stallone movie (which it is) or as a Hill movie (which it is), but it's more interesting as a Hill movie.

If it gets this director back into the hard-driving action game, then it will have done its duty.

Back when he was hotter, Hill made The Long Riders and 48 Hrs. and the undervalued Geronimo: An American Legend, and he knows a lot about how to film and frame and deliver violence and violent stories on screen. The style here -- hairline-to-chin close-ups, nervous, jacked-up editing -- isn't Hill at his best. But the movie has a certain grungy panache -- panache being a French word and Bullet to the Head (initially titled Headshot) being derived from a French graphic novel titled Du Plomb Dans La Tete. So. Voila.

The bare bones of the graphic novel remain, though a key plot element has been foregrounded. The movie wastes no time in bringing together the vicious but honourable hit man played by Stallone and the crusading police detective played by Fast & Furious co-star Sung Kang, who's a tad dull. Stallone is something other than dull: He's riveting in his way. His hairlike hair and facelike face certainly command attention. The part he's playing is a Stallone-y variation on Nick Nolte's cop in 48 Hrs., the sort of lug who makes jokes about Confucius even though his wary partner in bad-guy killing, the Kang character, hails from Korea.

The plot has something to do with police corruption and skeezy development deals and an incriminating flash drive. Stallone's character, Jimmy Bobo, has a tattoo artist daughter, played by Sarah Shahi. The vibe of the movie recalls a Crown International Pictures programmer from the Reagan era, but with more confidence behind the camera. This is thanks to Hill, who can't make the material any better. But some of the less overtly gory sequences, such as a fast, brutal tangle in a men's room, work well and take you back to Hill's heyday.

And before they get what's promised by the title, supporting players such as Christian Slater (amusing as a Big Easy party boy who throws an Eyes Wide Shut-style masked ball) and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (as Mr. Big) give their boilerplate dialogue a lift, thanks to a merrily sadistic wag of the eyebrows, or an extra spark of venality in the eyes.

-- Chicago Tribune

Other voices

Selected excerpts of reviews of Bullet to the Head:

"To claim the dialogue is written to comfort the narratively challenged would be mere quibbling, as the pic's chief pleasure lies in its store of funny lines, which Stallone tosses off with genuine brio."

-- Jay Weissberg, Variety

"Stallone is still better than Schwarzenegger, but this is just as dumb as Last Stand, and choppy to the point of incoherence."

-- Roger Moore, McLatchy Tribune

"Fun in parts, and Stallone's always watchable, but it's an '80s tribute movie that coasts along on rapidly diminishing goodwill."

-- Chris Hewitt, Empire Magazine

"Certainly noisy, occasionally amusing, but chiefly a reminder that the cinematic legacy of dull 1980s storytelling deserves a bullet of its own."

-- Siobhan Synnot, Scotsman

Movie Review

Bullet to the Head

Starring Sylvester Stallone and Sung Kang

St. Vital, Towne

14A

92 minutes

3 stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 1, 2013 D3