Film Review | Bullet to the Head

At some point in time, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger (along with a couple of their meathead action star colleagues) decided that we owe them a second-wave career.

It all started with their 'dream team' gathering - The Expendables and its sequel - which nobody really asked for. And now we can expect a double-bill of solo adventures from Sly and the former 'Governator'.

The latter aging action hero will be returning to our cinemas soon with The Last Stand: a tale of tough justice on the Mexican border from the Korean director Kim Ji-woon (The Good, the Bad and the Weird; I Saw the Devil).

But first out of the gate is unapologetically trashy and resolutely old-school revenge thriller Bullet to the Head - starring Sly Stallone and manned by veteran action director-producer Walter Hill.

As he tells us through the medium of the predictably gravelly voiceover, Stallone is lone-wolf hitman Jimmy Bobo, who is resigned to his amoral calling, confessing that he's been jailed over 20 times and that a mercenary existence is the only life he knows.

Save for a loving but uncommitted relationship to his daughter Lisa (Sarah Shahi), a tattooist-cum-amateur-doctor - "I'm not a good father, but I support her" - Jimmy is not the type to grow emotionally attached to anyone (or anything, for that matter).

But when his dependable partner gets murdered by a fellow contract killer, Keegan (Jason Momoa) - working in the interests of an African crime lord (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and a corrupt lawyer Marcus Baptiste (Christian Slater) - Jimmy's mission becomes a personal, and hardly straightforward quest for revenge.

But as he cuts through the tangled web of corrupt dealings to get to his target, Jimmy's mission is complicated further when he ends up lumped with a detective, Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang) charged with investigating the murder of Jimmy's partner.

Jimmy saves Taylor's life when he gets caught in gangster crossfire - but will this favour be enough to ensure that Jimmy doesn't get put into jail for life when his vindictive spree is done and dusted?

Adapting the story from a French comic book by Alexis Nolent, you'd expect Hill to crank up the nostalgic pulp-trash levels up to 11 and go to town with the source material - in an ideal world, this would be a vivacious pastiche in the vein of Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City.

But instead, the team appears to be content to coast on Stallone and Hill's former glories, delivering an actioner that's not only devoid of any surprises, but that appears to insist on having the most boring - and, for a film of such lean duration, really quite padded out - structure.

What with its pulp comic book origins and the fact that it resuscitates Stallone's hard man image, you watch the film wanting to believe that Hill is approaching it with his tongue at least slightly poking into cheek. But the over-the-top moments simply aren't over-the-top enough to score any jokes, and the dour pacing and tone don't contribute to the fun in any way.

As what happened with Taken 2, I ended up wondering why it didn't end up being relegated into the DVD discount bin.

But I suppose the goodwill towards Sly is still around in the cultural ether somewhere: floating in a puff of latent testosterone and the collective nostalgia of the 80s/90s generation of red-blooded males.

Pity he's not convinced by it all himself. Because save for a few moments of bona fide bone-crunching - the climactic, axe-wielding melee is particularly notable - Sly insists on proceeding through the thing half asleep, as if his half-presence is enough to carry an already flawed film.

What he needs to learn is that second-wave careers are all about bringing something fresh and new.