In the early 1980s, Sylvester Stallone was attached to 50/50, a mismatched buddy thriller – one guy is a cop, the other a criminal. For whatever reason – they couldn’t get the right co-star, maybe Stallone insisted on re-writing the script (he did a lot of that back then) maybe RHINESTONE, his musical with Dolly Parton seemed a better idea, Stallone passed and the project became 48 HRS. This in turn afforded a starring opportunity to one Eddie Murphy – Nick Nolte played second fiddle – and an unstoppable movie legend was born, until A THOUSAND WORDS, that is.

Stallone must have kept director Walter Hill’s number in his old Filofax – remember those? For, on his umpteenth comeback movie, Stallone phoned him. ‘Hey, we were gonna do that thing. Now what if we did this thing? Only I’m Eddie Murphy.’

One can only imagine Hill’s reply: ‘must have been a crank call! Hey, even I can do a better Stallone impression and I’m, like, old.’ But Hill and Stallone got together for a comic book adaptation entitled BULLET TO THE HEAD in which Stallone plays Jimmy Bobo, a career criminal turned hitman who abuses his body with steroids and botox – sorry, whose buddy gets knifed in a bar and wants revenge. He teams up with Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang) an out-of-town Korean-American cop – hey, Stallone ain’t gonna be upstaged by some Chris Tucker-type – to track down the perpetrator who turns out to be Fake Conan (Jason Momoa) or should I say Fake Dwayne The Rock Johnson.   

Somewhere in this New Orleans action-non-thriller is Christian Slater as a corrupt lawyer who holds the kind of masked ball where women wear masks and nothing else – you wonder how they proved they were 21. Meanwhile Taylor falls for Jimmy’s daughter (Sarah Shahi) who gets kidnapped by the bad guys in the final act.

Expect a fight in a bathhouse, Jimmy blowing up his old retreat to elude the bad guys, Taylor not realising that the cops are on the villain’s payroll until almost too late, and a climactic fight in a warehouse. It clocks in at less than ninety minutes, too, if you don’t stay for the credits. So what’s not to enjoy? Well, if you like your thrillers totally generic with zero surprises – except that is that this flirts with racism – then this may inflate your dinghy. For me, it rather burst my life protecting vest. I blew a whistle to attract attention but no one came.

I don’t what supplements he has been taking – it sure isn’t Complan, big fella – but even Stallone’s slur has a slur. His face looks as though it was carved from a jelly mould. We get plenty of opportunities to look at the younger Stallone – Taylor skims through pictures of him as a juvenile Lord of Flatbush (or from BANANAS if you prefer). You think ‘hey, he had charisma. He inspired Quentin Tarantino. Where did it all go wrong?’

Here’s the problem. Stallone does not want to get old. He wants to turn himself into some kind of plastic monument, the kind that will be declined by most retailers. True, he isn’t trying to pass himself off as a love interest. He is seeking to find situations where a man hanging out on his own drinking in a bar from his own bottle is somehow credible.

Very occasionally, the film exhibits a sadistic sense of humour that gets a laugh – he runs over a bad guy without hesitation at one point. Underneath it all, Stallone is still competing in DEATH RACE 2000, even though he is old enough for Grecian 2000. (Remember that?) Mostly, you could plot it yourself. It does not even have banter. Stallone isn’t the only actor who wants to fix the clock. You sense that Slater, the erstwhile star of CHURCHILL – THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS, also wants a shot at his own star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. What does he get? Why, a bullet in the head, of course.

Hill directs like a man who has finally gotten over SUPERNOVA, his foray into science-fiction that crashed and burned. As for Mr Momoa, he gets to swing an axe. Did I tell you that I hate films where the villain throws his gun away because he wants to challenge the hero to close combat? Just shoot him! Instead we have an axe fight and no beheading. That must be a Remington Micro-axe. Shaves as close as a blade or – arghh!