AN EXCLUSIVE CITYARTS CRITICS DISCUSSION OF WALTER HILL’S COMEBACK

Bullet to the Head is an event. It is director Walter Hill’s first theatrical film since 2002’s Undisputed and the most meaningful Sylvester Stallone acting vehicle since Rocky. On this occasion, I discuss the significance of Bullet to the Head with CityArts film critic Gregory Solman, author of the definitive essay on Hill’s oeuvre, as a good movie, an essay on masculinity and an advance in contemporary cinema aesthetics.

AW: Stallone’s performance as career hitman Jimmy Bobo reminded me of Charles Bronson’s streetfighter in Hill’s directorial debut Hard Times. The same grizzled features, the same masculine ethos. The plot of Bobo teaming up with policeman Taylor Kwan (Sung Kang) recalled Hill’s buddy movie 48 Hrs. Hill and Stallone’s cinema histories are combined, and the action genre is updated.

GS: It’s the ideal comparison, I agree, because Hill makes the essential emotional connections to character lesser directors ignore—directors, I might add, who are all worse at directing action than Hill, yet are no better than him with actors. I like reminding people that when Bronson’s performance stunned everyone in Hard Times, it was Bronson’s 60th movie—and Hill’s first. I won’t forget Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing, either. Stallone’s saturnine mood and weathered face are alone more interesting than his revivals of Rocky and Rambo combined, because Hill understands the power of genre and, more than anyone else in contemporary filmmaking, takes to heart F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crystalline bromide: “Action is character.” Have new filmmakers learned from Hill in Exile, or from Neveldine/Taylor, for that matter?

AW: Hill in Exile is an interesting way to describe the past decade of inept action movies. From David Fincher to Steve Soderbergh and the Bourne movies, most filmmakers don’t know how to film action with meaning or action heroes with ethics. Hill has been sorely missed. Remember the pop culture fun of Streets of Fire, which updated pop nostalgia and genre refinement?

GS: It was cinematic celebration from start to finish, and gets at Hill’s great advance in comic-book form. The sledgehammer fight anticipates the fire-axe battle between Bobo and mercenary Keegan (Jason Momoa), but beneath that lies the inevitability of one-on-one confrontation between, in this story, the two breeds of ex-military mercenary: Bobo and Keegan, who has an embittered idealism defined by codes of manhood.

AW: This movie has the best dialogue in years. Hill knows how make a few words matter. He evokes personal ethics and sums up genre ethics.

GS: He brought back his signature single-exchange scenes, too, which I love. I’m not a fan of Bobo’s final, or rather, penultimate riposte [“That’ll be the day”], though I like the recapitulation of Jack Cates, the cop in 48 Hrs., in Kwon’s challenge, and imagine Bobo to be a fan of John Wayne in general, Ethan Edwards in particular. To be clear, it’s not the line itself, or the association, but it strikes me as an over-articulation.

AW: I disagree. The Searchers is a famous cinema touchstone. I love that Hill rescued Wayne’s line from a pedestal.

The Walter Hill dialogue continues at www.CityArts.info

Past meets present in The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone’s not-so-sly exploitation of action-movie aficionados that unites 1980s action heroes—the incongruously named Sly (himself), Bruce (Willis) and Arnold (Schwarzenegger)—with a few contemporary action-figure he-men: Jason Statham, Jet Li and the wrestling world’s Steve Austin and Randy Couture. But proof that Stallone is living in the past isn’t the HGH vascularity or his stretched, tightened face. The real sign is that The Losers and The A-Team already preempted his concept. The Expendables repeats the same gang-of-rogues plotline.

Unfortunately, when the ’80s meets the Aughts, nostalgia isn’t enough. Although director Stallone—or whomever—stages action scenes better than Chris Nolan in Inception or Phillip Noyce in Salt, it is the style of action that has been outclassed. When Stallone pals around with Statham, it’s a desperate example of corniness hanging on to the coattails of efficacy.

Described here as having “one of those perfectly shaped muscular heads,” Statham displays his specialty—group kills—in a b-ball slam-dunk scene that is also a show of true chivalry. Statham has already refined the action-movie hero into a stylishly lean MMA fashion plate and his set pieces marvelously recall at least the surface of Luc Besson and Paul W.S. Anderson’s elegance and political savvy. “Now you know what I do for a living,” Statham declares. His proficiency cuts through Stallone’s sap with a gleaming, piercing blade.

Sly’s attempt at “heart” (“We’re both mercenaries; we’re both dead inside,” laments Eric Roberts as an old warrior-agent-traitor) seems embarrassingly “sincere” yet verges on cynicism. Or is it shamelessness? Guest-star badasses Roberts and Mickey Rourke seem drafted-in from a different level of ’80s audacity—the Actor’s Studio branch. But Stallone betrays them with unworthy material. The camera focuses on Rourke’s nose as he delivers the depressing confession: “It all dried up.” At least Dolph Lundgren is let off with a simple, “Remember that time we were in Bosnia?”

The Expendables isn’t an inherently bad idea. It could have worked—perhaps as karmic commentary on Hollywood’s dispensable attitude toward looks, youth, dignity and the Screen Actors Guild. (This is the sorriest gallery of cosmetically ruined faces since Diane English’s film of The Women.) But worst of all: There’s none of Tarantino’s respectful genre form or his well-publicized love for resurrecting has-been actors. None of Larry Cohen’s understanding of genre as life and actors as political icons, which he demonstrated with Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Ron O’Neal, Roscoe Brown, Paul Winfield and Pam Grier in the similarly plotted 1996 Original Gangsters. With Stallone’s propensity toward violent schmaltz, our movie fans’ hopes for rejuvenation cannot be met. The Expendables is third-rate.