9 Bullets

Watched this on Hulu last night as I had 90+ minutes to kill. I'd have been better off watching a YouTube video of grass growing. Quite simply nothing at all good about this movie. I gave it 2 stars because the actors themselves weren't bad even if their dialog and plot points were awful.

As many have noted the first thing I thought of with the opening premise was Gloria from the 80s. I haven't seen that in decades and now want to go back to try and scrub this from my brain.

As others have also noted the movie just doesn't know where it wants to go or what it wants to be.

The fact that we're supposed to buy into a relationship between the boy and the woman who have zero connection other than being neighbors is too much to ask. The kid just had his entire family murdered and a few hours later they're laughing and joking about her skirt being too short and PB&Js.

Now it's easy to slice and dice it from a plot/reality point and I wont do that on everything ( there were many ) but there are a few notable things.

Why wouldn't she just bring the kid to the closest non-local ( avoid corruption ) police station ?

Why was she still pretending to have this weird love/hare relationship with a dude that killed an entire family ?

Tie those 2 together and the police put him away for life.

SPOILER-Even in the end he gets away and there's no punishment for him-SPOILER

How/why did Worthington's character get from the cemetery which was seemingly hours away to the airport where his young g/f just happened to be ?

But maybe my biggest problem with it was the fact that Gypsy tells this horrifying story about losing her kid in a car accident and then thinks its OK to let the kid take the steering wheel on a dark road while she's sleepy. And then she does the letting him drive thing a few more times. WTH

Then it's all wrapped up nicely with them going away together and him no longer caring that his parents were murdered.

Just absolute trash. Wish I could unwatch it.

This film could very well have been an acceptable, if formulaic and somewhat cheesy thriller. However, the character of Sam is just... not well acted at all. Child actors can't often rise to the level of their adult counterparts, but in this case it just really drags the whole film down and makes its shortcomings into glaring faults.

Doesn't know if it's a thriller, a family film or just a bad guy meets bad girl film but somebody seems to have told half the cast it was a comedy judging by the acting !

This is a nonsense story with struggling out of work actors looking for a pay day and a director who thinks a whiny kid pulling at the audiences heartstrings is a guarantee of success !

That kid was very annoying BTW !

Could you possibly squeeze any more cliches, red herrings and garbage side plots into a film with five minutes worth of story ?

Good filming and production, the sound is good and the lighting is faultless, that's why I gave it 3 stars !

America's greatest independent writer/director, John Cassavetes, and his wife, the incomparable actress Gina Rowlands, made a great film called "Gloria" in 1980.

It is so well regarded a film that it has been copied no less than five times. Among the copies, are (inverting the genders) Luc Besson's film with Jean Reno and Nathalie Portman "Leon the Professional", "Julia" staring Tilda Swinton.

But "9 Bullets" is a truly junk rip off of Gloria. Tedious, laughable dialogue, lousy acting.

Some child actors will make or break a movie and character development of your main villain is essentially left out of the story.

The film was given a great actress and common premise but had nothing original to offer. We we're left to imagine a backstory and left to nothing on the screen and a sound track that couldn't support the tone of the film consistently. The film isn't worth saying more about.