Bullet to the Head

It must have been a head injury or something, doctors are not sure at this stage, but despite not knowing the cause the symptoms are painfully clear. Stallone has simply forgotten that the last twenty years happened. I know its silly to assume Stallione had anything other to do with this film other than turning up, doing his lines and collecting his presumably at least 50% of the budget pay check, but there is still a part of me which believes that he is in charge of every project since the roaring success of ‘Staying Alive’, even though his current condition dictates that he cant remember a moment of it. The upshot of this (dubious) case of amnesia is that Bullet to the Head is pretty much the most 80s movie created since 1989. We’ll be generous and call it an homage to the genre, but lets be clear, it isnt that intelligent. The thing is, action movies in the 80s were bloody brilliant, and because this is actually, fully, without a doubt an 80’s action movie, its sort of hard not to love it. It has some issues, its a bit, sort of racist, and a lot sexist and the acting is quite silly. But dont forget, all these things were actually expected in the 80s. I know, we cant say things like “my Gran is a bit racist but its ok because she grew up during the war”, but Stallone seems to know this too, so he throws in  couple of one liners about him being an old guy. Lets just set the tone, the first line Bobo utters (yeah his nickname is Bobo, got an issue with that?) is ” The guy I just saved is a cop. That’s not the usual way I do things, but sometimes you gotta abandon your principles and do what’s right.” this is preceded by Stallone shooting a guy…in the head. So you start thinking, ‘yeah he is a killer, but he doesnt like it, he did it to save the other guy’. Then something begins to not add up, because it turns out Bobo is a hitman with absolutely no issue with slicing and dicing anyone, so long as he gets the franklins. Turns out, this isnt a spoiler, that the ‘principle’ he is referring to is that he usually doesnt help out cops. Tone set, thats the level of ridiculous. For the real spoilers continue reading – Now we can talk about the real reason we know this is an 80s movie, aside from the soundtrack, the naked women for parties for no reason etc, the villian is trying to build fucking condos! Seriously, the evil plot, of the stereotype evil plot guy is to buy up ghetto and make it into condos. This has got to be the most lame ass evil plan in history. Never mind that we never get to see the people who live in the ghetto, so we dont really mind if all their former homes get made into quite nice looking conos, this plan is just something which actually happens pretty regularly, it doesnt require the killing of people. Its ok though, in the 80s this was a big social issue I guess, so it really does work in this context. So I have a plan, they are re-making all the good movies right, because they ran out of ideas in 1993 (yes that is the year Jurassic Park came out) which might explain Stallones condition, so why not re-make back to the future, send the cast of Expendables three back to the 80s and have them kill terminator one.