There has been a renaissance of great B-movie westerns of late; this year gave us Ti West’s genre bender “In A Valley Of Violence,” and last year S. Craig Zahler‘s (side-splittingly?) unforgettable “Bone Tomahawk.” Similarly, the Southwest has served as the setting for a handful of timely border-related thrillers (“Sicario” being the best of them). It’s natural, then, that a film would come along and meld the two together: a modern-day smuggling drama hitched with the dusty small town, the greedy business tycoon, and the tired sheriff of the western. The tragedy is that the film, Gonzalo López-Gallego’s “The Hollow Point,” is so utterly incompetent, so inexcusably bewildering, and so bafflingly hollow.
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The film opens with some heavy-handed emphasis on setting: the severe and treacherously barren lands that make up the border between Arizona and Mexico. It’s a dusty, grueling world, as beautiful as it is deadly, and the people here are doing whatever they can to scrape by. Which is why two young Arizonans have taken to smuggling much-needed ammunition to the cartels across the border. The trouble is, the meddlesome alcoholic Sheriff Leland (Ian McShane), who has all but given up on the decency of man, abruptly kills one of the smugglers during a traffic stop, thus cutting off the precious flow of bullets. Little does Leland know, but severing the ammo supply will have grave consequences for his small municipality by way of an infamous, unstoppable hitman (John Leguizamo).
Add into the mix Wallace (Patrick Wilson), a deputy who has returned to town to relieve Leland of his badge and take on the sheriff mantle, and you’ve got the makings of a perfectly palatable B-movie. The problems, though, are evident from the get-go, resulting primarily from what appears to be a lack of singular vision for what “The Hollow Point” is supposed to be. Muddled by just about every aspect, López-Gallego’s (“Apollo 18”) film crumbles under astoundingly incoherent dialogue, tonal awkwardness, dull characters, and telegraphed twists. Not to mention that any suspension of disbelief is bucked repeatedly by the outrageous and senseless choices that the characters make — choices that are often against their best interests, let alone the interests of what they are trying to achieve.
It’s hard to overstate just how frustrating “The Hollow Point” is, mostly because there are so many hints of the bloody, outrageous thriller it could have been. But rarely do these hints metastasize into anything substantial. In fact, the only saving grace is McShane himself, in part because he so clearly leaned into the absurdity of the movie. His drunk and philosophical Leland is an almost nonsensical character, a self-appointed embodiment of justice: judge, jury, and executioner. On the other hand, Wilson, a solid supporting actor who did great work in the aforementioned “Bone Tomahawk,” turns in a fine but deeply uncharismatic performance that vacillates between the B-movie fun that McShane revels in and a painfully self-serious solemnity. Thus, McShane is left with no one to match his farcical energy.
Elsewhere, “The Hollow Point” is similarly divisive. The film is gorgeously shot: moments of meditative stillness nicely contrast the kinetic excitement of the small town, horror-esque set pieces. But the soundtrack is loaded down with some jarringly out-of-place choices (the closing romantic moment is scored to the twee pop track “Nothing Arrived” by Villagers). More than anything else, though, “The Hollow Point” feels crippled by a disastrous script from first-timer Nils Lyew; not only do the characters lack coherent motivations, but half the time they seem to be holding entirely disparate conversations, ignoring each other completely. Not to mention that yet again, an undeserving white male hero somehow wins the affections of a woman who he does nothing but talk down to. And beneath it all, like so many westerns before it, “The Hollow Point” seems to want to say something about the violent nature of men, but I’ll be damned if I have any idea what it is.
Still, while it may sound like the film is borderline irredeemable, “The Hollow Point” knows its place; it knows of its B-movie roots, its tired plot and well-worn archetypes, and beneath the burden of the sorely unoriginal, it does manage to be occasionally funny, occasionally surprising, and occasionally the bloody and bombastic genre cliche it set out to be. [D+/C-]