As most of us who watched his evolution as flawed but heroic Detective John McClane, Bruce Willis stated in DIE HARD 2 that ‘progress peaked with frozen pizza’, but progress never does peak in any shape or form.
In the new action yarn HARD KILL, Willis plays a billionaire CEO, Donovan Chalmers, who holds the key to a new normal future of technological advancement in the form of ‘Project 725′, which his daughter has developed. Unfortunately, she has gone to the wrong side to try and demonstrate its’ evident power, a terrorist called ‘The Pardoner’ (Sergio Rizzuto)
Chalmers recruits rough-and-not-so-ready security expert Derek Miller (Jesse Metcalfe) who brings together his own team of relentless and ruthless soldiers-of-fortune, including a brother-and-sister pair, who put all their trust in Miller to get the job done.The mission takes them to a disused factory location, where all of a sudden a few hard truths from Chalmers and others in the zone will reveal some of the darker intentions….
Well, I wonder what the real value of $640 million dollars in negotiable bearer bonds would be in inflation adjusted dollars over three decades for Willis, as HARD KILL pretty much returns him to the sort of single location locale that made DIE HARD into the surprise classic action film that holds it dear in millions of fans.
The surprise here is that Willis takes a back seat to the action at times, leaving it to Metcalfe and co, who are out to protect both him and the honour and love of the free world with the technological McGuffin we have seen umpteen times in the Bond, BOURNE and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE sequels of recent years.
Action-wise, this is reminiscent of Ben Wheatley’s FREE FIRE and THE RAID in tone, keeping the action confined to the single location and it is that where the film scores highly, allowing the action to take precedence over the human story (the father-daughter arc is bog-standard and rather clichéd, having been covered in Willis’ own work like DIE HARD 4.0 / LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD).
However, we don’t come to an action film for character development, do we? We want gunfights and hand combat a la HAYWIRE as well. With HARD KILL, one senses that Willis is winding down as a front-row action star, but not quite ready to hang up his holster and Baretta just yet, so grab a few beers and pizza, sit back and let the gunshots fly!
