Loyalty and oaths create cowards out of all of us. Remember the Rod Steiger incident, playing the mafia elder from Arizona who is now comfortably situated in the Swiss chalet while buried in guards. One loose end still exists: his mistress Jackie. It’s unfortunate, but she is going to have to be eliminated.
But, Steiger now attentively hears his aides explain the newest trends in kidnapping and murdering in Europe. “One specific instance, what these folks accomplished,” said a crook is they severed the hand of the man and dispatched it via the postal service as evidence that they were in charge of him. Naturally, since the Italian postal services is Well, it’s awful fast.”
“Fingers?” Even after Steiger has not found Jackie, his love still brings him deep into depression. When Steiger gets undivided attention, he demands things be quick and painless while also retaining the promise of paying the best killer money can buy. To configure his devotion, he angrily wipes the buffet right in front of me onto the ground.
Meanwhile, Jackie may no longer be the person who is the most affectionate towards him. She has come across Charles Bronson, the Phoenix police officer who tracked Steiger down to Europe to seek vengeance for the death of one of his soldiers. Is Jackie in alliance with Bronson? Is she a faithful decoy, oblivious to Steiger trying to eliminate her? Or is she the spacey blonde she seems to be with her high-pitched hayseed accent and Dolly Parton wig?
These are some queries that the movie seeks to answer and indeed it can provide those answers, provided there is proper order in the layout of the movie. But that is not the case. “Love and Bullets” depicts a haphazard blend of chasing, killing, curiously undisclosed meetings, and annoying emotive scenes by Steiger which are coupled with startlingly passive scenes by Bronson. After a few decisive killings, Bronson along with Ireland are shown calmly strolling down a snowy slope that is adjacent to a mountain lodge. Suddenly, they are on a dock, getting off a boat. The sudden contrast is jarring, along with the question, ‘Where are they? Where were they? Whose boat is it? Why did they have to go from one place to another?’
The truth is, the movie does not particularly focus on such details.
This does qualify as an entry in a travel journal, but a scripted thriller should pay heed to a plot. Is there a minimum wordage policy exercised just to make dubbing easy? The movie did not use minimalism as an avant-garde technique. Dialog is deliberately withered down, perhaps to broaden the appeal to overseas viewers. Even a pure Hitchcock North by Northwest has some of the best characters, care, and bends which the viewers connect with. His prowess forces them to connect with the plot. But what can we expect from Love and Bullets? Certainly not a dull monologue he tries so hard, so routine.
What could be even more boring, are Bronson’s movies these days. Hard Times of Walter Hill seems to truly be the only ambitious drama around. Elise Potboiler, in my opinion, is the template out of which dilettantes sink toward mediocrity. These are written and directed with absolute zero inspiration and creativity. Yet Bronson shamelessly walks through them, completely oblivious to the fact that he has stumbled through each of these plots at least a hundred times before. Why isn’t there a single clever use of the Bronson screen presence? Why is it room temperature, boring, or thrown away?
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