Hard Kill Parent Guide

Following his career in the army, Derek Miller (Jesse Metcalfe) found work as a private military contractor, a gun-for-hire for the uber-rich. He and his elite team of dangerous killers have just been hired by tech billionaire Chalmers (Bruce Willis) to protect him from radical local terrorist “The Pardoner” (Servio Rizzuto). But there’s more to this job than Miller has been told…

Chalmers’ real goal is to lure The Pardoner to an abandoned warehouse and use Miller’s team to wipe him out – not that he told Miller that when he hired him. Underprepared and outgunned, Miller and his team are going to have to find a way to defeat The Pardoner and stop Chalmers’ new technology from falling into dangerous hands – but whose hands are the most dangerous now?

This movie feels like it was written by a 15-year-old Tom Clancy fan with a serious concussion. It is, for lack of a better word, mind-numbingly stupid in almost every respect. The characters are, at best, cardboard cutouts and, at worst, a random jumble of behavioral clichés with no real personality. The primary antagonist spends most of the movie being referred to as “The Pardoner”, which apart from being a terrible nickname for a radical terrorist, doesn’t strike me as the kind of name anyone would use. Worse, every time they say it the movie feels more and more like a promo ad for some kind of WWE matchup.

Apart from being absolute trash, Hard Kill is poorly made and irritating trash. A real dumpster fire if ever there was one. Look, I’m all for brainless dumb action movies. I’ll defend the John Wick franchise – each movie is two hours of incredible action stitched loosely together with some vague revenge narrative. It works because the stunts and the action are so compelling and well-choreographed. Hard Kill didn’t bother to make any part of the movie good in the first place, so this is just 98 minutes of melodramatic idiocy with two coats of fake blood.

This movie stays true to genre, with the biggest concerns being profanity and violence. The profanity is sprinkled pretty evenly throughout, but the violence escalates drastically in the second half. Stabbings, shootings, hand-to-hand combat – you know, the usual.

I have a pretty high tolerance for stupid in action movies, but this is too much even for me. By the thirty-minute-mark, I began wondering if I might be better off just watching Home Alone and Rambo side by side. By the 35-minute mark, I had given up entirely and was debating the merits of leaping out my window to play in traffic. Hard Kill, to put it bluntly, stinks. It’s annoying, poorly made, and generally inane. This movie is so bad that I started thinking about cleaning out my closet, a job so unpleasant that I’ve been avoiding it for years. Do yourself a favor and watch literally anything else. Or just stare at your wall for an hour and a half. You’d honestly have a better time.