Bullet to the Head: It’s all about the guns

Walter Hill knows how to make a decent buddy cop flick. He directed 48 Hours, the very funny movie that starred Nick Nolte as a ragtag cop and Eddie Murphy as a troublesome fugitive. Hill goes for something similar with Bullet to the Head but falls far short of the mark. This testosterone-fueled flick is all about the guns–both the muscular and the shooting kind.

Based on a French graphic novel, the film stars Sylvester Stallone as Jimmy Bobo, a hit man with a rap sheet a mile long. Jimmy is doing what he does best — killing a guy for money — when he runs into a bit of trouble. After he and his partner Louis Blanchard (Jon Seda) off their mark they drop by some local dive bar to collect their payment. That’s when a thug named Keegan (Jason Momoa) tries to take them out. Jimmy barely escapes and quickly realizes that they’ve been set up. When Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang), an out-of-state cop who does things by the book, arrives in New Orleans on an investigation that crosses paths with Jimmy, he doesn’t try to arrest the career criminal. Rather, he offers to help Jimmy track down the bad guys. Jimmy initially turns him down flat, but the two eventually form an uneasy alliance and start to unravel a web of double-crossing politicians led by a ruthless real estate developer (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).

Predictably enough, the film concludes with a showdown between Jimmy and Keegan. But that fight scene is just one of many that pits Jimmy against some brute. To his credit, Stallone still has a bodybuilder’s physique and can tangle with the best of them. But there’s only so many times that you can see him wrestle some guy shirtless and the film fails to develop the kind of chemistry between the deadpan Stallone and low-key Kang that would rescue it from its predictable storyline. In the end, the two relatively expressionless leads attain a strange sort of mutual respect. Their characters remain so stagnant, you wonder why Hill didn’t exploit their differences other than to toss in a few jokes about stereotypical Asians. It’s a wasted opportunity in a movie that’s a waste of time.