REVIEW: First Kill (2017) – Willis Screws Fans, July Edition

Run Time: 98 Mins
Rated: R
What To Expect: Overwritten, cheap with Willis once again MIA

This isn’t a 2017 movie where Bruce Willis screws fans with an absence from the actual show.  It’s a monthly one, at least that’s what I’m guessing.  July edition.  How many people were even aware that this movie existed?  Sad, sad sad… how have we gone from the likes of The Last Boy Scout to this?  Now a regular affair.  I wonder if Bruce Willis even knows the name of this movie, or if he even handled its script.  It’s called First Kill.

In this one, Hayden Christensen takes his bullied eight year old son for a manly trip in his old country town.  Christensen wants to teach the boy how to be a man and hunt his first deer with a rifle.  Out there, he encounters an old family friend, local sheriff Bruce Willis – one of the few encounters in the movie by the way – who tells him to be careful around these parts.  While out hunting, Christensen notices a shooting of another man by a corrupt cop.  In the fracas, Christensen’s son is kidnapped and the father must involve himself in a crooked heist if he wants to see him again.

The film suffers from what most VOD thrillers with has-been names suffers from; an over ambitious ‘plot’, with god-awful ‘twists’ and turns that probably originally had hopes of finding its way towards someone like Russell Crowe’s agent, but just ended up being another dreary, convoluted mess re-tooled for a greedy DTV scam.  Despite some nice scenery and a serviceable performance from Christensen and the kid, the thing circles the toilet at barely the half hour mark.  The action is also hoaky and uninspired, with lazy fight scenes and the tell-tale amateur hour drone camera overkill.

Would you also be surprised to hear that Willis is barely in the movie?  I can’t be sure, but I’d be surprised if it tallied at more than five minutes.  Why then is he on the poster of the movie along with Christensen and not the kidnapper?  I wonder if ‘being on the poster’ is a part of Bruce Willis’ regular VODmit negotiations.

You should take note of this movie, because it was directed by Steven C. Miller, who is going to direct Escape Plan: Hades, with Sylvester Stallone and Dave Bautista.  At present, that doesn’t look too good, given how bad this movie is.  But I suppose in the director’s defense, this movie was in the can in a mere 13 days.  How can anyone make a movie like that?  Especially when your cover star evidently doesn’t give a fuck and is likely not participating, at all.

Total crap.