Bullet to the Head takes the ignorance is bliss route, seeking to convince us that absolutely no time has passed since the 1980s when Stallone was at his prime. It takes the approach that the central character may be older and more weathered, but essentially he's capable of doing anything he could before.
It's a buddy picture of sorts that matches Jimmy 'Bobo' Bonomo (Stallone) with Taylor Kwon (Korean actor Sung Kang) - the former an assassin, the latter a cop, who have both lost partners and are seeking revenge on a common enemy. The plot proceeds as you might suspect, with distrust and pragmatism fighting for supremacy. In truth you might expect better from the director Walter Hill - the man behind The Warriors, 48 Hrs and The Long Riders, here very much on auto-pilot and delivering the basics. Ex Conan and Stargate-Atlantis star Jason Momoa provides the muscle they must both face to do so.
Even if the face and gait are heavier, it's fair to point out that Stallone still looks like a man who could take you down with one punch and the physical one-on-one scenes are well-choreographed set-pieces that drip with blood and sweat. What lets him down here is the retro-feel f the script, one that is based on a French graphic-novel but feels as if it has been sat ready to be made by any passing action star in two decades. Intentional or not, it's SO formulaic that it positively aches with familiarity and provides no real surprises. There's adequate support from the like of Christian Slater and Sarah Shahi but they are cookie-cutter characters asked to do nothing but fulfill basic plot points. It's like putting on a pair of old slippers that feel familiar but are barely held together.
Arnie is Ray Owens, the sheriff of a town on the US-Mexico border; happy with the quiet life after a long career that saw too many fatalities along the way. Now he writes parking tickets and shoots the breeze with the locals. That all changes when it becomes clear that there's something strange going on near the narrow county-line chasm that separates the two countries and the news that a notorious criminal, Gabriel Cortez (Eduardo Noriega) has broken out of police custody and is heading in that direction. There seems little that the sheriff, his skeleton staff and enthusiastic locals can do to stall the fugitive - especially as said bad guy is well armed and backed by a small army of mercenaries - but honour demands they try and soon we're in the middle of a contemporary western.
The story may be familiar, but there's a solid balance of humour and drama to pull this off. While one might expect Schwarzenegger to fall back on old cliches, he positively embraces the aching bones and weathered face and makes them part of the performance. This isn't a guy who is trying to be the action icon he was, but to convince us there's still some chapters left in his playbook. To a large extent it works, entertaining the viewer enough that they'll overlook the formula and just enjoy the romp.
To be blunt, this feels undeniably lazy, an uninspiring, unimaginative film that doesn't require a suspension of disbelief so much as an attention-span of about five minutes and the ability to leap plot-holes that would put Prometheus to shame The first Die Hard might not have been the height of realism, but if feels like a documentary compared to the outright macho-silliness on show here. Gone is the brave underdog taking on a gang of bad guys we met in the 1980s, here comes the indestructible super-hero who literally jumps off buildings in a single bound and manages to flip the bird to helicopters as he plummets to the ground unscathed (watch closely, I'm not kidding). None of which would matter if only its star didn't look so unimpressed himself.
The ironic thing is that when he's committed, Willis can be a good, convincing actor and a solid leading man... and his age hasn't changed that perception - merely his film choices. But whether it's the leaden, illogical script, the video-game mentality, the shallow direction by John Moore (Max Payne) or just an innate apathy, here Willis does the absolute minimum to get through the film - grimacing, frowning, pontificating on fatherhood and bonding with his estranged son in the way that only a cold brewski and a high-calibre weapon can manage. Ridiculous levels of property damage ensue and take us from central Moscow to a certain infamous nuclear reactor in the space of a few minutes and geography-ignoring limited running-time. Here we find the kind of cinematic radiation where some ned to wear protective suits, the McClanes wear plaid and one minion runs around with a bare tattoo'ed chest. Yes, it's THAT stupid.
So, on points and possibly against expectations, it seems to be Schwarzenegger that emerges through the testosterone haze as the front-runner. Both Stallone and Willis are too tied to the past to be moving forward, grasping at old demographics and denying the passage of time while the 'Austrian Oak' seeks to branch out and bring his existing fan-base with him to new horizons.
These action stars may or may not be considered 'old dogs' by some, but the 'new tricks' have never been more needed.
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