Director: Matt Eskandari
Distributor: The Searchers
Duration: 98 minutes
Hard Kill (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
Bruce Willis may have been one of the most iconic actors in Hollywood, to now only wallow in the past and produce his own movies, making him the (almost elderly) action hero. While some of these films prove to be watchable or even entertaining, most end up being generic uninspired action flicks. Nonetheless, he still gets asked to play in other companies’ action movies as well, and that brings us to Hard Kill. The movie already had a simplistic plot when we read the synopsis, it actually proved to be a lot more simple and duller than we thought.
Hard Kill’s plot is simple. A ‘world-changing’ tech falls into the hands of a terrorist organization, and tech CEO Donovan Chalmers (Bruce Willis) is the one who can unlock its potential. As this technology may ‘destroy the world as we know it’, he hires a team of special ops to fend off the terrorists, hoping to save the day. The only catch is that the terrorists also have Donovan’s daughter in their claws, making the situation more complex.
The flow of Hard Kill is somewhat what you’d expect from these generic films. The scene is set in the first few minutes of the experience, to then turn into a long action sequence, that sometimes elaborates a bit further on the original plot. We see a movie that probably only had four pages of script, being turned into an hour and a half of rubbish. Even with a plot as simplistic as this, things could have been a lot more entertaining, or at least show some signs of depth in both its narrative as well as the characters being presented throughout the film.
Acting performances are in accordance with the film’s quality plot, meaning they are absolutely subpar. We see Bruce Willis unconvincingly play a tech CEO, who happens to have an extensive military background. However, that seems of little relevance, as in this movie he just says a few lines, stands for half an hour, and then spends nearly an hour sitting in a chair, to fire a gun once. That is basically the extent of his acting in this film, while still being presented as the headliner, together with Jesse Metcalfe. The latter scored a few bigger roles nearly a decade ago in teen movies, or comedies being the ‘handsome one’, and now he is seemingly in the same boat as Bruce Willis, performing in B-quality movies. The rest of the cast does not fare any better, with the main villain being portrayed by Sergio Rizzuto, who has the stage presence of a sack of potatoes, behind a brick wall, in a completely dark room, of a building with no entrances, buried deep underground.
The Blu-ray edition of Hard Kill does not come with a single special feature whatsoever. While this is not needed for a movie such as this, some of the fighting choreographies that went into this project would have been nice to explore. Then again, after some research we found out that this movie was filmed in ten days, making it clear it was just a small project to (hopefully) cash in for those wanting to see Willis in action.
Conclusion
Hard Kill feels like you’re watching a themed amateur airsoft match for a bachelor party. The plot gets explained during the first two minutes of the movie, to eventually turn into a long-winded absolutely boring ‘tactical’ gunfight in an abandoned building. With only ten days of filming invested into this project, with a cameraman that clearly cannot control his own camera, we were reminiscing about where Willis comes from. Instead of trying to cash in on titles such as this, we hope to see proper projects tailored to his current age, such as the RED movies, or even his appearances in The Expendables. Hard Kill made it very hard to kill the time till the credits started rolling. For this thriller, we were thrilled that it was over.
Hard Kill (Blu-ray) - Movie Review,
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