Movie Review: The Hollow Point (2016)

Guns. Terrifying devices of death. In movies, tv, and video games I guess they’re fine, but in real life they’re some of the scariest things ever… at least they seem like it. I’d prefer to keep my distance.

Ladies and gentlemen… “The Hollow Point”.

Wallace (Patrick Wilson) is the newly appointed Sheriff of a small US border town. After a drug cartel deal goes horribly wrong, he has to investigate what happened. And as his investigation moves forward, he runs into all kinds of danger. So now we have our crime drama. And I was admittedly into the plot early on. I sat there thinking “Okay, this could be fun”, and it was kind of fun in a gritty crime drama kind of way, but soon it turned into a messy, overly serious, generically written, and boring plot about death and morality. It showed good promise at first, but soon it failed me.

The characters in this are kind of bland and uninteresting, even if the script would like to think that they’re deep and complex. Patrick Wilson plays Wallace, the newly appointed Sheriff of this small border town. He’s kind of a jerk, but there is a bit of heart somewhere behind there. And the only reason why I even remotely cared about him is because Patrick Wilson is a great actor, and he gave a really good performance here. Ian McShane plays Leland, an old, morally bankrupt cop that Wallace kind of works with throughout the movie. And you know what you get when it’s Ian McShane playing an asshole. The character isn’t as interesting as some of his other, similar roles, but at least McShane’s performance is damn good. Then we have Lynn Collins as Marla, a good friend of Wallace. She cares about her closest ones, and occasionally can show a tough side to her, but she’s not that interesting a character. And Collins is… fine in the role. Then we get some decent supporting performances from people like Jim Belushi and John Leguizamo. Characters, not that great. Acting, good.

The score for the movie was composed by Juan Navazo, and it was a mixed bag. There were a few tracks here that I thought actually sounded pretty good and somehow made their scenes/moments a bit more interesting. But then there are tracks here that think they are really cool, but don’t really work within the movie. There were a few licensed tracks used throughout a well, and they worked… fine.

This movie was directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego, and I think he did an okay-ish job here. It’s decently shot, and his direction never feels fully bad. The action scenes in this too, while not very complex or even great, are decently enjoyable. One problem I do have in terms of this more technical stuff is that there’s some weird editing in places throughout, making cuts that gave it a weird flow and such.

This movie hasn’t been very well received. On Rotten Tomatoes it has a 31% positive rating. On Metacritic it has a score of 41/100. And on imdb.com it has a score of 5,4/10.

Despite a (mostly) talented cast, “The Hollow Point” isn’t a particularly good movie. The plot is messy and boring and generic, the characters are uninteresting, the music is a mixed bag, and there’s some weird editing here. But the performances are solid, and the direction is okay. Time for my final score. *Ahem*. My final score for “The Hollow Point” is a 5,12/10. So despite a few good things, I’d recommend skipping it.

My review of “The Hollow Point” is now completed.

Meh.