BULLET

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND A SENSE OF TIME TRAVEL

Most pseudo-Grindhouse movies seem to want to hark back to some golden age of tacky exploitation: the 1970s, and the thrill of seeing triple bills of uncensored gore movies, badly dubbed kungfu imports and hardcore porn projected out of focus. The Tarantino-Rodriguez Axis Of Nonsense seems to have managed to make us nostalgic for something the UK never really had in the first place: the Times Square and 42nd Street Experience of watching sleazy trash in terrible conditions (watching double-bills of films like Vice Squad, Ghoulies and Lone Wolf McQuade doesn't really count when it's in a nice comfy cinema in Wardour Street). Some of these have been quite fun in their homage, even if they're too long, glossy or expensive to really capture the grindhouse spirit.

The spirit of Bullet (nothing to do with the Steve McQueen classic Bullitt) doesn't actually go back to the 1970s; rather it appears to have stuck in the mid-to-late 1980s and the debatably glory days of Cannon Films. Danny Trejo is a tough cop taking down the drugs gangs; kingpin Jonathan Banks wants his son out of prison so he kidnaps the cop's grandson in order to secure a release with Trejo's false confession of corruption. Obviously Trejo doesn't take kindly to the scheme...

It's almost exactly the kind of movie Charles Bronson would have made in his 10 To Midnight and Murphy's Law phase, with the possible exception of an early sequence in which Danny Trejo goes cage fighting (I think we can all agree that we never wanted to see Bronson do that). Sadly, it isn't very good: noisy and entirely disposable bang-bang nonsense with a high body count and very little sense about it. Trejo is always fun to watch, though, but Bullet is no Machete, or even Machete Kills.

**

Bang: