With the proliferation of streaming services, a new kind of action movie has risen to prominence; the low budget thriller featuring an aging A-list action star. From Mel Gibson to Russell Crowe, former box office titans found a second life as the marquee stars of DTV or direct to streaming actioners made on the cheap; though few have been as prolific as Bruce Willis. With over a dozen credits within the past decade, Willis is quickly becoming the king of this particular sub-genre. Hard Kill is his second offering of the year and his third with director Matt Eskandari. But with this many recent credits under his belt, one has to wonder; is Willis honing his craft or diluting his brand? Ultimately, it all comes down to the quality of the film itself.
Hard Kill is as potboiler as potboiler gets. Willis plays an ex-military turned industrialist named Chalmers (leave your “steamed hams” jokes here, please). He hires a team of good old boy mercenaries lead by Derek Miller (Jesse Metcalfe) to rescue his daughter, recover stolen doomsday tech, and stop the nefarious mastermind known only as “The Pardoner”. It also takes place in a giant warehouse. And there’s an army of faceless goons in tactical gear and masks… Maybe a “steamed hams” joke would liven things up.
With FOUR credited writers, you’d expect a story that might have an ounce of originality; or at least something resembling originality. Sadly, the plot resembles a cutscene from Call of Duty and the dialogue isn’t any better. Every line sounds like it was created by a computer algorithm set to the “military badass” preset. The characters and their backstories all fit neatly into archetypes bordering on cliche; often feeling like a student film written by people who had never actually been in the military. The jokes feel tired. The relationships are stilted. Absolutely nothing about the script is remarkable in any way. The greatest shame of all this is that it kneecaps what is otherwise a very well made movie.
Despite the modest production budget and resources, Eskandari and his team have managed to put together a surprisingly cinematic contained action thriller. The warehouse location provides a surprising amount of variety in its visuals and the cinematography has a real gritty charm to it. The film’s action, while relatively small scale, gets the job done with frequent shootouts and entertainingly “Hollywood” action moments: bad guys standing out in the open while shooting, overly dramatic yelling in anger during a gunfight, questionable magazine size for almost all weapons (reloading is for wimps), etc. The action has a bygone era charm to it that only kind of takes itself seriously. The occasional CQC is also well executed with the actors’ faces often visible during the fights.
Due to the script, none of the acting comes off very well. There’s only so much you can do with dialogue this boneheaded. While most of the actors give it their best, it’s Metcalfe and Willis who fare the best. Many would accuse them of showing up for a paycheck, but the star qualities that earned them those paychecks are on full display here. If nothing else, it’s a testament to how much these actors can bring; shame that the material they’re given isn’t really utilizing them. Chalmers is a role that Willis could play in his sleep and Miller is the kind of stock ex-military type that any actor worth his salt has in his back pocket. While most of the other actors are unspectacular, it’s the villain who truly suffers the most.
With an alias like “The Pardoner”, Hard Kill’s villain is already starting with a handicap. Played with all the menace of a mid-level office manager, Pardoner would be more believable if he were simply micromanaging the accounting department. The character wasn’t very well written to begin with and actor Sergio Rizzuto struggles to make this villain a real threat. He spends much of the movie sounding annoyed by his army of faceless henchmen before full-on yelling at them for their ineffectiveness in the third act. Maybe if there had been a giant right-hand man to serve as the muscle to Pardoner’s tactician, it might have worked. For that matter, having henchmen with ANY personality whatsoever would have helped immensely. Sadly, Pardoner is forced to shoulder it all by himself.
It’s a shame to see a team with so much fire and potential be doomed by a script this mediocre. With a better plot and dialogue that sounds like actual humans wrote it, this could have been a really entertaining contained thriller. There was potential for a great siege movie here, but it wasn’t meant to be. The best thing about Hard Kill is the obvious hustle that went into making it. While the film is as dumb as a bag of hammers, it’s a VERY well made bag of hammers.