During the opening credits, there are glimpses of our hero Derek (Jesse Metcalfe) having flashbacks to fighting in the Middle East. As we all know, this is action movie shorthand for Hero Who Has Seen Some Shit. Hard Kill is the kind of movie that doesn’t trust its audience to accept the obvious. Because of that, after the opening credits, we see our hero having MORE war flashbacks, PLUS close-ups of his back tattoos AND back scars… all of which suggest… you guessed it… Hero Who Has Seen Some Shit. It’s one thing to state the obvious. It’s another thing to beat a dead horse for the first five minutes of the flick.
Anyway, Derek steps into the limo of his new employer, a billionaire named Chalmers (Bruce Willis) who hires him and his military team to serve as protection. It seems Derek’s old nemesis, a terrorist known as “The Pardoner” (Sergio Rizzuto) has stolen Chalmer’s new A.I. technology AND kidnapped his daughter (Lala Kent). To make matters worse, the place he agreed to make the exchange is a crumbling old factory that is almost impossible for Derek’s team to fortify.
Bruce Willis makes these Emmett/Furla movies on a weekly basis it seems. He makes so many of them that you have to wonder if the early scenes with Bruce in the limo were filmed while he was on his way to the set of another Emmett/Furla movie. Like many of these Willis/Emmett/Furla ventures, he isn’t really the star. Instead, the heavy lifting this time out goes to Jesse Metcalfe. In previous Emmett/Furla productions, Willis was paired with the likes of Thomas Jane, Frank Grillo, Michael Chiklis, and Christopher Meloni. Not bad co-stars if you can get them. However, most times he plays alongside co-stars such as Cole Hauser, Kellan Lutz, Chad Michael Murray, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar.
Guess which category Jesse Metcalfe belongs to.
Hard Kill (which was probably titled to trick older folk with memory problems into thinking it was Die Hard) is a joyless, uneventful, and dull slog. It mostly takes place in one ugly location, the supporting cast are all forgettable, and the villain (who looks like a Bradley Cooper stunt double) is blander than bland. The action suffers from too much slow motion (again, to remind the audience that our Hero Has Seen Some Shit) and the various shootouts are rudimentary at best.
Willis doesn’t exactly phone it in, but he seems itching to use the speed dial. The problem is, he isn’t given much to work with and he usually has a sidekick around to handle the exposition-heavy stuff while he stands around looking glum. The way they get around overworking Willis is pretty funny though as Metcalfe and his team lock him in a room and forget about him for a good twenty minutes of screen time.
In short, Hard Kill is hard to watch.
I thought this one was pretty fun.
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