After dipping a toe into the pool of arthouse embrace and rejuvenation with James Mangold’s Cop Land, and finding the reception a bit chillier than he would’ve liked, Sylvester Stallone has mostly retreated back into his man-cave of 1980s-style actioners. This is not entirely a bad thing. His reasoned, surprisingly smart and moving Rocky Balboa, from 2006, stands as a compelling drama in its own right, and a worthy bookend to the original film. But this wounded mindset also begat 2008’s Rambo, a sloppy, nihilistic and near-pointless exercise in sadism and explosions-go-boom! theatrics.



The forthrightly titled Bullet to the Head, an adaptation of a French graphic novel set in the Louisiana bayou, would on the surface seem to fall comfortably in the mold of the latter — a block-headed, meat-and-potatoes-type action movie in which nuance is as much the enemy as any on-screen foil. And sometimes… well, sometimes the cover is the most appropriate way by which to judge a book.

Stallone stars as Jimmy Bonomo, an unapologetically direct hitman who, when his partner gets killed after a recent job, is thrown together by circumstance with Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang), a by-the-book visiting cop from Washington, D.C. Each targets themselves, Jimmy and Taylor form an uneasy alliance, to try to bring down a shady figure of the criminal underworld (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and the psychotic enforcer, Keegan (Jason Momoa), doing his bidding. When Jimmy’s daughter Lisa (the not-unattractive Sarah Shahi) gets caught up in the mix, it only further stiffens Jimmy’s resolve to finish things definitively.

The most disappointing things about Bullet to the Head have to do with just how much of a retread it feels like — from the villains, with their master list of all the politicians and cops on their payroll, to even the bizarre, declamatory voiceover narration that opens (“Sometimes you gotta abandon your principles and do what’s right”) and ends the film. Screenwriter Alessandro Camon’s adaptation of Alexis Nolent’s Du Plomb Dans La Tête delivers its exposition in comically chunky paragraphs, and never quite figures out a way to make the targets that Jimmy and Taylor must work their way through seem like more of a viper’s nest and less of an obligatory mortal ladder.

Director Walter Hill serves as a pace-master, and keeps things moving briskly and effectively — even if the staging for one sequence where Keegan walks past a bunch of thugs, loudly murders guys in another room and then returns to the aforementioned room, where said thugs are not ready for him, is thunderously stupid. Stallone and Kang, meanwhile, have a bit of a nice, prickly rapport, even if their conflict seems largely manufactured. The problem, in a nutshell, is that Bullet to the Head isn’t quite insane enough. If you’re going to have a movie with an axe fight, and an Eyes Wide Shut-style drugs-and-sex costume party where topless women tango with one another, then shouldn’t you also not have the incriminating evidence your bad guy is paying to retrieve stored in a folder marked “evidence”? That’s insane, but not in a good way. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Warner Bros./After Dark Films, R, 93 minutes)

A wan, overly precious and self-satisfied psychological thriller that tries to toe the line between gender statement and ambiguity, Girls Against Boys is a kind of junior thrill-kill revenge flick that doesn’t touch the same high points of any of its many inspirations or antecedents. While it eschews overheated sensationalism in a manner that rather belies its most forthright plot synopsis, the movie doesn’t engage in the necessary heavy intellectual lifting to blossom into anything special.

Shae (Danielle Panabaker) is a naïve college student who, after getting dumped by her older married lover (Andrew Howard) and assaulted by a guy (Michael Stahl-David, of Cloverfield) she meets on the rebound, appears to be teetering on the edge of withdrawing into a cocoon. Her seemingly unstable co-worker Lu (Nicole LaLiberte), however, takes Shae under her wing, and suggests a brutal and unnervingly direct plot of revenge. Shae quickly acquiesces, and a number of men pay the price for, variously, their actions, inaction or gender. After a wild swathe of retaliation, though, Lu’s dangerously obsessive possessiveness threatens Shae’s burgeoning relationship with a shy classmate, Tyler (Liam Aiken).

Powered by a sometimes dizzy, sometimes grinding techno-type score that seems to aim for some sort of opaque mood statement not always matched in the movie’s visual vocabulary, Girls Against Boys is a revenge flick, but almost incidentally so. As grim or unsettling as some of the action is, Shae and Lu don’t manifest much reaction during their crimes. All the film’s men, meanwhile, are entirely incapable of reading reactions, which as rendered seems less a gender commentary and more the function of a poor script.

Writer-director Austin Chick seems chiefly to want to stir up a carefully crafted mood-bubble of indistinctness, but his scenes are entirely self-contained, and lack a grander cohesiveness — he doesn’t seem to have the interest, bravery, skill or combination thereof to push past the crust-layer of his conceit and into a truly interesting direction. The lack of deeper explanation here — Shae is too easily “in” with Lu’s plot, and lacking a strongly differentiated personality — gives off a thick feeling of no psychological seriousness. It is of small credit that, despite its premise, the movie doesn’t descend into lowest-common-denominator gore, but Girls Against Boys also has nothing of substance to say about the actions of its characters, so Chick instead has the girls just do things like sing along to Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.”

Within the parameters of Chick’s narrative, Panabaker and LaLiberte deliver grounded, watchable turns. The former is quiet and introspective — a fact that Chick takes advantage of in the framing of his close-ups — while the latter, with a thousand-yard stare and almost comically large eyes, summons an elemental dread that outstrips the nastiness of her actions. The film, though, doesn’t achieve any of the absorbing backdrop grittiness or deep-rooted character insights of its assorted forerunners, like Lilya 4-Ever, Single White Female, Fight Club, Baise Moi or The Brave One, among others. Girls Against Boys is good at standing in contrast — and not being any of a number of dumb or reductionist things it could be, just based on its story. It’s far less successful making any sort of proactive and persuasive case of its own, however. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay Films, R, 92 minutes)