Bullet to the Head

The Sylvester Stallone of Walter Hill's Bullet to the Head is a grimy, hulking monolith, words garbled and semi-unintelligible. Has Stallone ever been this mushmouthed? He sweats, he swears, his eyes never change, a zero point Stallone that we've come to know in the last few years; the 21st century Sly. But the Sly of Bullet to the Head takes this beyond the Sly of The Expendables and Rocky Balboa. His indifference towards one-liners remains endearingly camp ("You had me at 'Go fuck yourself'!"), and his particular, termite talent for burying into character particularities gives his Jimmy Bobo (gotta be a Stallone scripted name) an odd, muted definition.

Hill directs the film the way Sly acts it. The grubby, sweaty neons and asphalt, that Hill grime that is beloved in 48 Hrs. and Extreme Prejudice, greets 21st century action cinema half-heartedly, and the film's failings fall in the grey zone attempt to update his style (helicopter shots, quick edits) while remaining old-fashioned. Blessedly, the classic Hill largely wins out. What we get then are the familiars (aforementioned neons, slide guitar, harmonica, bars), presented in a disarmingly laid-back approach, the plot unfolding with efficiency, the characterizations modest (Stallone, by and large, doesn't change in the slightest), the action quick. Bullets and knives feel quite lethal here, surprising considering the frequent employment of contemporary techniques. Hill has always known how to land a hit (one thinks of a man's foot being blown off in Extreme Prejudice), allowing for bracing mortal threat each time a gun goes off, and he brings that quality here.

Like most good contemporary action films, this is minor, unambitious stuff (only John Hyams, Neveldine/Taylor, and Paul W.S. Anderson are really trying new things), but one can't really ask for much more when stacked against the quick cutting dredge that makes up the bulk of America's current output. What Walter Hill brought back after eleven years can't really be called new or earthshaking. What he brought back was the Walter Hill we've always known, and that is a great thing.