Everything old is new again.
Remakes, reboots and throwbacks proliferate the pop-culture wasteland with
alarming intensity. Every 80s icon you ever
loved (even the ones you hated) are back in a big way.
Retreads aren’t anything new. Hollywood has always been notoriously
risk-averse, more willing to bank on name-recognition than on an unknown
original. Nostalgia careens headlong
into cynicism whenever another revival is announced. The
Expendables, for example, was simultaneously the best and the worst thing
ever mainlined into multiplexes. The
easiest thing in the world to sell, but ultimately less than the sum of its
parts.
Who wouldn’t be pumped by the prospect of Regan-era action
heroes sharing the screen, cracking skulls and one-liners? Problem is, throwbacks like The Expendables are shot through the
lens of today. That means hand-held
cameras, epileptic editing, shoddy CGI and misplaced pathos. There's just no room for Mickey Rourke's blubbering
existentialism in a movie where Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren trade punches.
Stallone’s recent Bullet
to the Head, helmed by action-guru Walter Hill, gets it right. It packs simple, testosterone-spiked pleasures. Guns.
Blood. Biceps. Explosions.
Wise-cracks. Roll credits. Sure, the script is shitty and the performances even shittier. But at least Sly knows how to toss
a bon mot the same way Hill knows how to conduct a coherent shoot-out. The bloodshed is copious, the body-count
relentless. Clocking in at ninety
minutes, Bullet to the Head is
refreshingly lean and mean.
And that’s all I’m asking for in an action movie aping the
80s. Lose the pretention. Cut to the chase. Get in, shoot shit, blow shit up, and get out.
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