MOVIE REVIEW -Bullet To The Head

The new Sylvester Stallone flick, Bullet To The Head is out this week.  Pleasant name isn't it?

Here comes yet another mid-winter forgettable action movie that somehow Hollywood thinks we need.  But before I go on any further, this really isn't all that horrible. In fact, there are tons of movies that come off way worse than this.

Stallone is still making movies and playing hard cases.  Here Sly plays James or "Bobo."  He is a life long criminal and has been arrested 26 times.   He is a hit man now, doing horrible work for big pay in New Orleans.   After being double-crossed on a job, his younger partner is killed in another contract hit. Bobo finds that the people after him now are farther up the ladder than he's accustomed to dealing with.

Bobo teams up with a cop Taylor Kwan (Sung Kang) who is a Washington D.C. detective who is in Louisiana investigating  the people Bobo has now come in contact with.   So the strange partnership ensues.  Bobo starts out wanting only to avenge the death of his partner, but finds out that he must fight for his own life.  And eventually for the life of his grown up daughter who ends up being kidnapped by these lousy people. 

First off, this movie is aptly named.  Because throughout the entire movie, there are plenty of bullets to the head - literally.  This movie is graphically violent, but not overly by today's standards.  There is a boatload of killing here.  Although in its slight defense, all of it central to the story. This is not one of those silly action flicks that just kills to kill.   They try hard to develop characters, and this is not as poorly written as many of this kind of movies can be. Stallone all by himself is a character, or at times a caricature of himself.   Although props to him. At his age (65) he still looks pretty darn good, and can pull this off to a degree.

This movie in the end will suffer from a terrible movie disease that plagues a ton of these kind of films.  It's forgettable.  This looks, sounds and feels like 5,000 other dark winter time action movies over the years that star a bevy of young and aging action heroes.  That's where I felt that The Expendables series has broken through that Sly has championed.  They have a separator of fun, action, and tongue-in-cheek that this certainly does not.  There is some attempted humor here, but not enough to give it any real life or charm.  In a year, no one will really remember this except when an edited version of this is on TNT every other weekend.

Bullet To The Head.   A Redbox or Netflix at best later. The only reason to go to the movies and see this now, is if you want to get out of the house for a couple of hours.