Mark Reviews Movies: HARD KILL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 24, 2020

For a movie mostly shot at an abandoned factory, likely over the course of a week or two, Hard Kill is still pretty unimaginative. A villain has stolen a vaguely destructive device and taken a hostage. A team of mercenaries, hired by the hostage's father, have to stop the bad guy's evil plans. There's a lot of shooting, stabbing, and fighting, and everything more or less works out by the end.

Such movies probably seem easy and, more importantly, profitable, especially if the bulk of the budget is, as was likely the case here, the rental fee on the space, the assorted prop weapons, and at least one actor whose name is something of a draw for people. The most recognizable presence here is Bruce Willis. Despite the title (To get to the sneakiness behind it, answer the question: How does someone die if they suffer a "hard kill"?), he doesn't play the hero.

Instead, he's the wealthy CEO of a technology company, who hires the mercenaries, and the father of the hostage, who actually gave the destructive device to the central villain. "Now," the daughter of Willis' character explains with about 10 minutes left in the movie, "I understand my mistake." It's not when the villain, a terrorist, starts killing the mercenaries. It's not when he took her captive. It apparently isn't even after the terrorist uses the device of shaky specifics to crash a passenger plane. It's when he takes her dad as a hostage, threatening to re-capture and torture her in order to make him give up a code to unlock the device.

Setting aside the questionable impetus for the entire plot of Chris LaMont and Joe Russo's screenplay, this isn't a particularly smart movie. The thinking on the part of the screenwriters and director Matt Eskandari, apparently, is that it doesn't need to be one. It just needs to have some heroes, a villain to fight (with a seemingly unlimited number of anonymous henchmen), a reason for the battle to take place, and as much action as possible.

As for those specific qualities, we first have the heroes. They're led by Miller (Jesse Metcalfe), a former soldier who now makes his money doing freelance private military-style operations. Chalmers (Willis) wants to pay him and his ragtag team a lot of money to provide security for him. We briefly meet the three members of Miller's team (played by Natalie Eva Marie, Swen Temmel, and Tyler Jon Olson), and soon enough, they're fighting for their lives, because Chalmers didn't mention that the villain needs to capture him for the dastardly plan to work.

The villain is called "the Pardoner" (Sergio Rizzuto), and in terms of the performances here, we're pretty much left to gauge their quality based on how well each one enunciates that nickname (Most of them leave out the "o," which leads to some amusing line readings, as if the actors occasionally slip into some Old West slang). He needs Chalmers to give him a code that will activate the top-secret device in his possession—a device that, again, Chalmers' daughter (played by Lala Kent) gave him, hoping that he, a terrorist, would prove it could do good for the world. One of the more amusing things is how the screenwriters dance around this decision and the atrocious judgement that would lead an allegedly intelligent person to make it.

The key sign of how little plot there is in this movie is the way we don't learn what the device is, what it does, or what the Pardoner's plan is until the second and third acts of the movie. It's all-too telling when the entire foundation of the plot is instead treated as a series of lazy twists.

As for the action, well, Eskandari definitely makes sure those various guns get a workout, while every corner of the bland factory is shown at one point or another. The action choreography basically amounts to characters hiding behind pillars and shooting, as digital sparks fly and, oddly, electrical sounds accompany bullets striking concrete. The hiding doesn't matter too much, because characters often just walk toward the shooting henchmen without getting hit (Someone does take a bullet to the chest but somehow survives with just a coat to cover the wound). It's funny to watch these supposedly train professionals, trying to evade detection from nearby bad guys, shoot and shout in a cavernous room.

Hard Kill clearly was made on the quick and cheap, but that doesn't have to be a strike against the movie. That it's lazy, dull, and repetitive while being made quickly and cheaply is more than enough against it.

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