Bullet to the Head (2013) review

When The Last Stand was released, I was excited to see Arnold back in action and when I heard that Stallone was having his movie, I was just as excited. Following the abysmal ‘The Last Stand’, I began to lose hope in Bullet to the Head. I wanted to simply have a good time watching a Stallone film and when reviews came in saying that this film had some great action sequences, I was once more excited. The final result of this film for me is that it’s a good film but needed to be longer and have better action sequences and better fight cinematography.

‘Bullet to the Head’ follows the story of Jimmy Bobo (Sylvester Stallone) who goes on a revenge rampage, getting teamed up by a cop named Taylor (Sung Kang) to find and capture the man responsible for the death of Bobo’s partner. 

The story to the film is nothing special, it has definitely been done a million times before! However, the story itself at its core was interesting. The way that Jimmy interacts with Taylor, never trusting him was great. I loved that aspect of the film more than anything else in the film, even more than the action or Sylvester Stallone. This part of the story had some depth and I thought that the ending of the film was great, perfectly summing up the friendship and realism of how a criminal and a cop cannot easily become friends. However, as a whole, this film falls short of my expectations. 

My biggest issue with this film is simply the fact that there wasn’t enough action sequences in the film to keep me entertained. For a film that is more about Stallone and his ability to kick ass, I didn’t see too much of him doing that. Sure, Stallone is still as physical as he was back in the 80s but the action sequences were ordinary, bland and not really that exciting except for the film’s final battle involving Jimmy and Keegan (Jason Momoa) This action scene was extremely interesting, violent, intense and just plain awesome demonstrating how brilliant Stallone is even in his 60s. 

However, the issue with this film is that the rest of the film isn’t this engaging. The film itself should’ve been longer, had more bombastic action sequences and should’ve had far better fight choreography. At times, the fight cinematography was pretty poor that it became rather difficult to see what was really going on.

However, as many bad things there are about this film, there are also many good things that certainly work. Stallone does, he is still fantastic and continues to have the same agility as he did back when he was involved with films like Rocky or Rambo. As short as this film was, and even if it fell short of my expectations, I thought the pacing to this film was great. There were some great lines throughout the film and some great moments with Jimmy. Walter Hill did a decent job directing this film that doesn’t need to be seen by all. However, laying aside the criticism, this film is far superior to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘The Last Stand’

Grade- 6/10