Verdict
Summary
A very low budget and short (at 82 minutes) genre effort from writer / director Damian Lee, When the Bullet Hits the Bone is far too ambitious for its limited means to accomplish properly with never an opportunity for star Wincott to showcase his abilities as a martial artist. This is the guy who wowed me in Mission of Justice, Martial Law II, and Open Fire, among other very solid “B” movies where he elevated the projects, but Damian Lee did a handful of films with Wincott, but never figured out how to use him to the best of his powers. He typically put him in very (very) low budget junky movies like this one that at least gave Wincott a chance to act, but the biggest problem with these films is that there’s simply not nearly enough action in them.
Plot:
An ER doctor turns to the streets to get revenge on the bad guys who shot and killed his wife.
Review:
Jack Davies (martial arts action star Jeff Wincott from Last Man Standing) is an ER doctor with a wife who’s a nurse, and after work one day they’re walking home with their bags of groceries on the street when they’re both shot at by what appears to be a drive-by shooter. Jack survives, but his wife is shot and killed, and suddenly Jack is faced with a life-altering perspective: All his professional life, he’s worked to save people who’ve been shot and wounded by senseless violence, but now that he’s been personally affected by it, he spirals into a depression and a funk that he can’t shake. He wants revenge! He walks away from his life of peace and takes up a path of a vagrant, crawling the streets (sometimes literally, as he also seems to have become an alcoholic) to get a ground-view of the world. He begins following the trail of petty drug dealers, coming to understand (pretty quickly) that he and his wife were simply in the middle of a situation that he could never have avoided: Drug dealers working for the U.S. government were trying to eliminate a target, and he and his wife were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. As he begins to stand himself up, so to speak, he figures out a pretty big (and very implausible) conspiracy, but he’s intelligent and formidable, getting to the point that he becomes a stick in the proverbial craw of the evil people responsible for his wife’s death. Meanwhile, he aligns himself with an attractive woman (played by Michelle Johnson whose character doesn’t seem to own a bra) who is connected to one of the nefarious players in the shady game of drugs and senseless killings. She has her own stake in this bloody game that Jack becomes the dark horse at playing.
A very low budget and short (at 82 minutes) genre effort from writer / director Damian Lee, When the Bullet Hits the Bone is far too ambitious for its limited means to accomplish properly with never an opportunity for star Wincott to showcase his abilities as a martial artist. This is the guy who wowed me in Mission of Justice, Martial Law II, and Open Fire, among other very solid “B” movies where he elevated the projects, but Damian Lee did a handful of films with Wincott, but never figured out how to use him to the best of his powers. He typically put him in very (very) low budget junky movies like this one that at least gave Wincott a chance to act, but the biggest problem with these films is that there’s simply not nearly enough action in them. Characters shoot each other at point blank range (one scene has two rows of bad guys facing each other, pointing guns, and then firing at each other like a bunch of suicidal idiots), but there’s never a sense of exhilaration or escapism to the film. There’s never any catharsis for Wincott’s character, and the whole thing feels like a senseless series of exercises that don’t pump you up but only makes you tired. That’s not my idea of a good time.
Released on DVD in widescreen from MVD Marquee Collection, When the Bullet Hits the Bone at least looks and sounds solid, but other than the trailer, the DVD is pretty bare bones on features.
