Bullet to the Head (2013)

Bullet To The Head (R) - Review

"Putting the asinine back in assassin."

In a rather generic New Orleans a couple of hitmen take down their target and soon afterwards find themselves double crossed.  Meanwhile an out of town cop comes in to investigate the death of his expartner, the man who had just been assassinated.  In some tenuous plot contrivances the surviving hitman and the cop team up to take in (or down) those who are responsible.  Bullet to the Head is based upon an obscure foreign language graphic-novel, and the film itself seems targeted for an international audience, as vague and generic as any mass-market product needs to be.

Sylvester Stallone (Rocky) plays Jimmy Bobo, an aging hitman with a conscience and lack of facial mobility.  We know this thanks to laborious use of voice over and flashbacks accompanied by badly photoshopped mug shots of Sly through the years.  If you are looking for characterization beyond typical Stallone cave man staring these case files are as much as you will get.  His now-somehow partner, the incorruptible Korean-American detective Kwon, provides police intel through his crackberry and takes a few bullets as they follow the money upwards through a degenerate police force, a dirty Southern Lawyer, a disabled South African expatriot business man and his mercenary forces led by Keegan (Jason Mamoa of the new Conan and GoT).  The final showdown between Keegan and Bobo is a tepid battle with fireaxes, 2 actors each with the acting range of a rock grunting and lurching at each other until it thankfully ends.

B2TH is helmed by veteran action Director Walter Hill (48 Hours) who tries to spice things up with out of place splashes of color, freezeframes and overuse of flashbacks but can't overcome the stench of "again?" that permeates the film.  They throw in a subplot of Bobo's tattooed daughter just for eye candy, they keep a supposedly straight laced supercop in league with a admitted mass murderer (Christian Slater, a civillian in this fight, is murdered right in front of him!) just to keep the story moving and Stallone himself has played so many trumped up trigger men in his career that someone needs to take the archetype of "hitman with a heart" back behind the barn and put a... no that's too easy.

4.5 Lip Curls out of 10 (MEDICORE)