User blog:Porterfield/Bullet to the Head - Review Roundup

It seems like every action star from the 1980's is desperate to make a few more wallet-fattening blockbusters before their joints give out. I can't pinpoint exactly when it started, but let us blame Stallone's 2010 film The Expendables, which featured not just one 1980's action star, but all of them, and led to last year's sequel.

Obviously the driving factor is money and fame. Artistically, I think most of these guys should be aiming for a Clint Eastwood-like comeback as a bad ass old man a la "Gran Torino", but their muscles overshadow their acting skills and they just love explosions so much more than character development, well-written dialogue, wit, love, drama, and the lot. Outside the ensemble cast of "The Expendables", we have Bruce Willis, who never actually left our radar, Arnold's big return in The Last Stand, Al Pacino and Christopher Walken currently starring in Stand Up Guys, and now Sylvester Stallone in Bullet to the Head. It's a strange trend, but not unwelcome.

At the end of the day, you know what you're getting into if you see these films. A Stallone action film is a Stallone action film. He shoots people in the head for a couple hours, delivers some cheesy one-liners, and looks like a freak of nature. Apparently this film also includes some racism against asians and appearances by Christian Slater and Khal Drogo, so take that for what you will.

Check out the reviews below, which are quite mixed, and share your own opinions at the bottom.

Mick LaSalle - SF Chronicle
Score: 3 out of 4

Excerpt: "Bullet to the Head" is a good action movie, whose title expresses what is, more or less, a recurring motif. It also gives a sense of the film's general attitude toward life. It's a film with no ambition but to get viewers' pulses moving. It does that, and with a fair degree of wit and style.

Rafer Guzman - Newsday
Score: 3 out of 4

Excerpt: Sylvester Stallone is in full effect in "Bullet to the Head," a thoroughly enjoyable blast from the past that finds the aging action hero delivering punches and punch lines with more power than he's mustered in years. Stallone, 66, has been mostly sparring of late, with a wobbly "Rambo" in 2008 and two profitable but silly "Expendables" films. Here, he looks ready to go the distance.

Lou Lumenick - New York Post
Score: 2.5 out of 4

Excerpt: Hill, who hasn’t directed a feature film in more than a decade, brings his own brand of old-school panache to all the mayhem. Quentin Tarantino could certainly learn a thing or two from Hill about how to direct a fast-paced, quip-filled B-movie, and bring it in at just over an hour and a half.

Robert Abele - LA Times
Score: 3 out of 5

Excerpt: "Bullet to the Head" is an adrenaline shot to your movie memory if the blunt, gleefully dumb, no-nonsense ways of '80s-style action flicks are your nostalgia drug of choice.

Manohla Dargis - NY Times
Score: 2.5 out of 5

Excerpt: And while the veteran action director Walter Hill hasn’t done much to enliven this dull, unmemorable material, with its mechanically moving parts and popping gunfire, its dull-red splatter and spray, he has brought a spark of wit to the proceedings, starting with the figure of Sylvester Stallone.

Richard Roeper - Chicago Sun-Times
Score: 2 out of 4

Excerpt: To its credit, the film does take one overly familiar tableau and has great fun with it, thanks in large part to Christian Slater's performance as a wealthy drunken patsy who quickly realizes the folly of keeping quiet when there's a Stallone with a pair of pliers hovering over you. It's a hilarious scene.

Tom Russo - Boston Globe
Score: 2 out of 4

Excerpt: But the movie’s best moments are when Stallone is serving aces, not trying to keep weak volleys going. His unexpected, withering irascibility saves that ridicule-courting title from all the obvious jokes.

Colin Cover - Minneapolis Star Tribune
Score: 1 out of 4

Excerpt: Appearing a week after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s entertaining comeback in “The Last Stand,” and alongside the larky Al Pacino/Christopher Walken caper comedy “Stand Up Guys,” “Bullet to the Head” has the feel of a Monsters of Rock concert thrown together to cash in on the nostalgia value of its fading star. Hardcore fans will fist-pump, but the rest of us would have a better time slipping a disc in the player and re-watching his original hits at home.

Ann Hornaday - Washington Post
Score: 1 out of 4

Excerpt: Stallone gets to deliver a few choice one-liners, and a montage of Bobo’s mug shots addresses with refreshing directness how his persona has changed over the years, from Rocky to Rambo and beyond. But the self-awareness of that sequence is completely at odds with Stallone’s posture throughout “Bullet to the Head,” in which he resembles something of a human waxwork, his cosmetically distorted face a Habsburg-lipped burlesque of his once sensuous scowl.

===Scott Bowles - USA Today=== Score: 1 out of 4

Excerpt: This marks a new low for Sly. Gratuitously violent and brimming with slurs against Asians, this may be his first mean-spirited movie. It's certainly his worst. Based on an obscure French graphic novel, Bullet is a 91-minute excuse to pile up corpses.

Wikian Reviews
What did you think of Bullet to the Head? Loved it! Thought it was okay. Hated it! I would never watch that.

Post your reviews in the comments section below!