Bullet to the Head (2012)

Walter Hill has spent decades making lean, mean genre pictures, and Bullet to the Head finds him returning to the well with a bucket that leaks. Sylvester Stallone plays Jimmy Bobo, a New Orleans hitman who teams with a Washington detective (Sung Kang) after both their partners are killed on the orders of the same corrupt businessman. Hill has said he wanted an homage to the action films of the 1970s and 1980s, and the result is exactly that: a movie that knows it is preposterous and does not care. The bullets are real, the plot is not, and everyone involved seems aware of the arrangement.

On the matter of casting, the film does something it never bothers to discuss. Thomas Jane was originally hired for the detective role, then replaced at producer Joel Silver's insistence that a more ethnic actor would broaden the picture's appeal. Sung Kang took the part. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays the villain, and Sarah Shahi appears briefly as a daughter who exists to be kidnapped. This is diversity as market calculus, a business decision dressed in nothing at all. The film offers no commentary on race, no consciousness of it, no interest in it. The cast is varied. The screenplay is silent.

The plot turns on a scheme to replace low-rent housing projects with luxury condominiums, which gestures toward class grievance before settling back into being a reason for men to hit each other with an axe. Nothing here sermonizes. Hill aimed for trashy and hit trashy, and the movie takes a quiet pride in having no message to deliver. It is the rare contemporary action film that asks nothing of its audience beyond a tolerance for blunt instruments. The result is forgettable, mildly diverting, and entirely without agenda. We classify it accordingly.