Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to Retirement: Bullet to the Head
by Steve Macfarlane
Bullet to the Head
Directed by Walter Hill
“Bang. Down. Owned.” So recalls New Orleans hitman Jimmy Bobo (Sylvester Stallone) to his slick, cool-cop frenemy (Sung Kang) in Walter Hill’s Bullet To The Head. If the title doesn’t give it away, this is a movie obsessed by points of entry and egress: punches that start fistfights, fistfights that end in car crashes, one-liners that bring conversations to a stone-cold halt. Stallone is describing an ass-beating he handed down, but he’s also talking to the guy who received it—maybe an unintended metaphor for the audience-studio relationship that characterizes these types of extremely-loud-and-incredibly-close-to-retirement endeavors. Bobo’s voiceover introduces him over a speedy montage of mug shots, so we watch Stallone age from plump-cheeked guido-phyte to a throbbing mausoleum on two legs, sneering defiantly all the way. “But sometimes you gotta abandon your principles and do the right thing”, he slurs. “Here’s how it went down.”
If I were to tell you the plot of Bullet To The Head were, um, lower on the priority-pyramid than getting the band back together, I wouldn’t be lying—something about shady New Orleans real estate developers, a flash drive with an automated index of bribed city officials, and a whack job that ends up with Bobo’s partner dead. Keegan, the guy who killed him (Jason Momoa, Conan 2011) is a similarly block-bodied hired killer who, it’s pointed out repeatedly, is dangerous because he “doesn’t care about money.” In the age of Anton Chigurh and Heath Ledger’s Joker, a compelling bad guy doesn’t have to do much other than annihilate everybody around him and keep on surviving—so Stallone’s craggy seen-it-all attitude finds a worthy adversary, which puts the real bounce in Bullet’s step. Along the way, a detective from DC (Kang) turns up to investigate the duo’s last job together, botched when Stallone hesitated from killing a prostitute because she had a black cat tattooed on her shoulder blade, similar to his smokin’ hot tattoo-artist daughter.
The inevitable warehouse showdown happens, and Keegan throws Bobo an antique fireman’s axe to propose a duel. (Bobo: “What are we, fucking vikings?”) The hidden comedy to these projects always comes from plopping someone like Stallone (or Schwarzenegger, aiming for another tactical winter comeback post-Expendables) in the realm of mere mortals and seeing how they fare for themselves. The nasal-voiced poindexter Kang is a better-than-decent foil; there are inevitably 10-too-many Asian jokes, but the camera cannily observes the guys scoping out a bluegrass bar and realizing neither has anything in common with the patrons. And so it goes: the old America disappearing before Stallone’s eyes. Unlike Sam Peckinpah, Hill’s self-awareness as a progenitor of dude-weepies has never gotten in the way of his ability to tell a story. Like Johnny Handsome, the filmmaker’s last portrait of New Orleans, Bullet proposes an America rife with depravity and hypocrisy, and all a guy can do to manage is wait—maybe adjust his muscle shirt, sip on some bourbon. This is a gleefully knuckleheaded buddy action picture by the Rembrandt of the genre, a film that—like the endless cacophony of lurid harmonica solos squiggled on its margins—glides with the assurance that, goddammit, it’s gonna play by its own rules.
Opens February 1
