Hard Kill

"The Control room, this is where the main computer runs from."

"It's hard to run a computer if we kill the power."

"Do you think it will work?"

*dramatic pause*

"It has to."

This is the level Hard Kill is working at. There's dialogue here that will have you chasing your eyeballs down the street after they roll right out of your head. A chase that will be far more fun that anything you see in this film.

Bruce Willis might be all over the posters but he barely exists in this film. You'll recognise his outline and hear a voice that sounds familiar but the Bruce you see playing billionaire tech genius Donovan Chalmers is vapour. All pretence of trying to act has gone out the window. He spends the vast majority of Hard Kill waiting in a room while all hell breaks loose outside and when he does emerge he barely raises above a whisper. His daughter is threatened at gunpoint beside him and he looks on like he's watching the Angelus. He doesn't care anymore and it's written across his dead eyes. DTV action flicks are rarely any cop in the acting stakes but this is as painful as it gets.

Derek Miller (Jesse Metcalfe) heads a team of mercs who only get called in for the real dirty work. Miller's last outing ended with him losing a friend and taking a bullet in the back and it's been playing on his mind of late. The job that gets him back in action is a protection detail. The subject is Donovan Chalmers and the enemy is a terrorist called The Pardoner (Sergio Rizzuto), the very man who ruined Derek's life years before. The plan of action is to retreat to an abandoned factory, use Chalmers as bait, wait for the bad guys to waltz right into their trap and in the immortal words of Metallica - kill 'em all. Everything is ready to go when Chalmer's daughter and co-worker Eva (Lala Kent) appears and throws a cat amongst the pigeons.

You'd love to have been in the room when this one was pitched. "We have a big abandoned factory......so.........let's make a film. Oh and let's base it all around a macguffin." "What's the macguffin?" "Ahhhh....we'll work that out in the editing suite." Everything about this is inept. The plot makes no sense. Characterisation is non existent. Everyone looks embarrassed. It's riddled with horrible cgi gunfire and bloodsplatter. There are plotholes you could walk the cast through. Metcalfe looks deeply uncomfortable as an action hero and the big 90's action hero in the cast looks like he'd rather be anywhere else. It feels like something made as a tax write off. It's charmless, boring and you'll not give a flying fig about anyone onscreen. And the aforementioned macguffin? It's never explained as always but here's it's just because no one could be bothered. Don't expect cutesy and clever in Hard Kill. You won't find it. 

This is director Matt Eskandri's third collaboration with Willis and it's his worst so far. On the basis of this everyone involved should just give up the ghost, go home and live off past glory. It's as bad as direct to streaming action gets.

Avoid like the plague.