User Reviews

Without giving too much away about the story line and plot, I will say it appears after many years of the "Super Hero" Bruce Willis we know, it seems he is portraying more and more "Bad guy" roles.

This is not to say I don't like Bruce in the Bad guy role. It just seems he's done a 180° on his previous typecast Good guy persona's. That said, this film had the potential to be very good. It lost that opportunity (for me), about 30 mins in.

This is a story of a man taking his wife and son to the country to bond with his son and teach him some lessons in being a man. The way he goes about it is ridiculous, but I will leave that to others to decide. The plot unfolds in a somewhat unique way then follows the typical Hollywood theme of an innocent stumbling on a corrupt situation and inadvertently getting involved and in way over his head.

The tea of the movie plays out like a predictable and so so novel. I have the film a 6/10 for a few good scenes and acting was above par. The film is palatable but nothing to write home about. If your in the mood for a light thriller and are a Bruce Wilis fan, then it's worth a watch. Otherwise, don't go into it with high expectations.

Levi was the only actor that showed promise. Hayden and Bruce both great actors were horrible. The plot was decent but executed horribly. The way they did Levi at the end was bull too, his whole family for that matter.

If I'm holding a gun and you are holding my son hostage with a pair of needle-nose pliers... I'm not putting the f'n gun down so that you can take both it and us hostage! That's the stupidity of this show! So many "oh who would ever do that" moments!? Became pretty hard to watch...

Weak to say the least plot. Unconvincing characters combined with pretty average to bad acting from almost everyone involved. Atrocious mistakes splattered all over the narrative and completely disorientating scenery. The fact that apparently the budget was limited offers little to no excuse for the director to deliver such product. On the contrary, it should have worked the other way around and force him and the screenwriter to double check their every turn.

For example there is some kind of chasing going on with car and buggies during which the buggies attempt to intercept the car by going further up the hill only to end up catching up with the car when it magically reemerges into the scene from a higher altitude than them. You gotta watch it to realize the magnitude of the screw up.

On top of everything, it sends all kind of wrong messages combined with some good ones, a dangerous cocktail when it comes to the supreme teacher which is the movies.

A bullied boy, just a day after he gets punched at school, goes on a hunting trip with his dad who tries to toughen him up by teaching him how to use a weapon. Nothing against hunting but the combo and its time frame is at least questionable.

The hunting starts and father and son end up hunting for deer at a location which looks more like a camping site than a deer hunting ground. The fact that the camera starts to emerge in order to show the forest, only to stop midway is childish. A guy throws a safe key where he hid a couple of million dollars a few meters away from his policeman accomplice and acts like he just threw it into an erupting volcano from which nothing can be retrieved. The father while trying to protect his son from the policeman, who managed to shoot the other guy at the right shoulder while standing 1 meter away from him and is now pointing the gun at his son (who for some reason apparent only to the creators of this film started running in a direction the crooked cop could see him, instead of going the other way where he would have been out of sight) shoots him dead on the spot, but instead of calling the other cops like any sane person would have done, takes the injured guy to his house and convinces his wife to perform a surgery on the spot.

Then they leave their kid who just witnessed a murder unguarded and the guy who got shot point blank miraculously wakes up and kidnaps both son and father while the mother tries to catch up by running behind the car, exactly like in the movies. This kidnapper, who apparently is a pretty stand up guy, ends up with the kid in a forest hideout the location to which only he and his girlfriend know.

Leaving aside the fact that Willis admits to the father that he was searching for this guy for months and was unable to locate him in this hideout, without explaining to us why, its incredible how suddenly everyone can locate this secret hideout easily and the place ends up getting packed with cops, crooked and good ones.Meanwhile, one of the crooked cops who must have broken or seriously injured his wrist trying to get out of the handcuffs the father put on him, kidnaps the mother and puts her in the normal police vehicle he was driving logically but at the scene she is forced off a range rover type of police car, while the cop also magically completely recovers from his hand injury.

After everything is resolved we get the final hammering when one of the good policemen happily gives an interview smiling about the recovery of the money, failing to realize or mention that half the police force who are now dead where the ones behind the heist.

I mean, I cannot believe the things I'm writing right now. Anyway, even though I could go on and on and on, I just hope a few people can avoid wasting an hour and a half for this. The fact that a superstar in Bruce Willis acts as one of the main characters is the true story behind this one.

Only decent thing here is the main story idea and the quite good plot point when Willis turns bad, but this makes the fact that it was shot this way even more frustrating.

As someone who enjoys watching movies (and relies on IMDb fraternity) I am writing this as my 'paying my dues' to my fellow sufferers. I watched this movie, not motivated by anything except the premise looked OK. I was not in the least bit influenced either way by seeing Bruce Willis in the cast (he had his best part in Pulp Fiction and everything has been downhill since) and did not even recognize who the lead actor was (Hayden who?). Boy, was I in for some serious disappointment.

The story is not original, but OK. There are tons of corrupt cops in this world although to be fair it is not immediately apparent that the entire PD (or Sheriff's Dept or whatever) was in cahoot with some bad guy doing bad stuff. The acting is uniformly bad, so bad that you actually root for the evident bad guy who is taking hostage and stuff. His portrayal of the semi-bad guy is semi convincing, the rest just awful, amateurish. And that is insulting amateurs everywhere. The kid does a decent job and there is a decent message on bullying. What the woman (mother of the child) was doing in the movie will remain a mystery (my theory is she is the Director's fiancé or the producer's mistress).

Back to the movie- the cinematography is bland, uninspiring. The chase on the quad- bikes through the forest as convincing as the Obama's 'you can keep your doctor'. The plot is made more threadbare by the repeated back and forth trying to protect the plot. And it does not succeed at any level. The leading man is slightly less charismatic than a wet cardboard show-box or three-day old stale pizza slice with anchovies on it. If he qualifies as an actor (and gets paid for it), we all have hopes.

Bruce Willis is abysmal at best. He needs to either pack it in or try acting. I assume that is what he was paid to do (unless it was his 'Star' name that would 'bring bums on seats'). The music score- someone else said- it is absent at key moments, and atrocious when present. I could not say it better.

Having wasted about 90 minutes watching it- why am I wasting another 15 writing about this? Because, I care. About my movie going brethren. It was a choice, a bad choice, like many others I have made in life. No one forced me to. I did not have full information and my choice, although turned out to be unwise, was not coerced. You, my friends, now have no excuse.

Final word: Sucks!

Somebody breaks into someplace presumably for a black bag. Some Wall Street big shot (oh yeah, we're all going to root for this guy) who looks like he's 16 is told that his son is being bullied, so he takes the family on a trip out to the small town he's from.

Then he takes his son hunting, because, uh, killing an animal is going to make a man of him? Well, they end up witnessing two guys arguing, one of them tosses a key, then the other guy shoots him. When the shooter sees the kid running around he turns to shot him so Wall Street shoots the guy. Turns out he is a cop. No matter, Wall Street decides to take the other guy, who's only injured, back to his place so the wife can heal him. Huh? Yeah. The guy does recover and takes the kid hostage back to his place. There he bonds with the kid. Wall Street in the meantime has to come up with stories for the cops. Then he finds the key and goes to the hostage-takers place where the main cop finds him. Now both go to the place where the exchange will take place--the black bag for the kid. And there everything will be resolved after a couple of surprises.

I can't even get myself to write a summary of this mess of a movie, which was almost painful to watch. We are asked to put up with so much nonsense and ridiculous stuff. This movie is complete amateur-hour but with a budget. Sure, somewhere there was an idea. But the writer's lack of experience comes across very quickly. This movie seems to be one of those that underwent countless re-writes by different people struggling for control--except it isn't one of those movies. I appreciated the fact that a coupe of the Southern characters weren't actually the really bad guys here, for a change. But I didn't appreciate this habit they have in movies of not naming the male young characters. As always the dad calls his son "kiddo," "kid," buddy" but never by his name. Who in the last 70 years talks like that to his son? Direction, too, is a mess. And don't be fooled by that action-movie marketing. It really isn't. It's more of a drama thriller. And a poor one at that.

Who the hell makes these films? Why? How? Surely the production cost outweighs the incoming revenue? Are they even human? There's no excuse for this garbage - bad film making that the director should be bloody ashamed of...Worse Than Passing a Kidney Stone. The acting in this stinker is all over the place! How this movie possibly got an average rating of 5.0 is beyond me.

Maybe Bruce Willis should say no to these b-movies were they post his name on the poster but he is in the film for about five minutes?

I get it he needs to work, but at any cost? He's a great actor, why spend it on mediocre films like this?

Because this is at best an fairly okay film if you're bored and has nothing else to watch.

And Hayden Christensen looks like he's still in high school, and why the obsession with hunting? He's a lawyer or something, and haven't been at the cabin since he was a kid. But when they get there it's like a life mission to make sure his son gets the deal with hunting and killing animals.

Watch something else

Willis speaks his lines as if he couldn't care less about his delivery of them! The best acting is done by the actors playing the crook and the boy. The lead's Range Rover is insulted (I'm a Brit!) by the lead's aunt implying that her truck will be better for the rough terrain when he goes hunting with his son! They only go into some woodland off a rough track, not the foothills of the Himalayas! Father and son take a break in the pouring rain, but sit outside an abandoned barn getting soaked! Need I go on?!

More plot holes than a Swiss cheese target at a shotgun convention. I know we are supposed to suspend our logic when it comes to movie plots but please don't treat us like total idiots. The premise of 'First Kill' is plausible enough. Wall street dad takes his paternally neglected and bullied son on a hunting trip to spend time, pass on some fatherly wisdom and make a man of his 11 year old boy. Unfortunately as we get to know the characters they just don't work. Dany who is the bullied young boy in the story comes across as the sort of kid who would be terrified on the teacups ride at Disneyland let alone about to go out in the woods to kill a huge mammal with a large hunting rifle. Ty Sheldon who plays Danny does a great job in his role but is just not believable. His father Will (Hayden Christensen) is equally uncomfortable in his role. Will takes Danny to his childhood home territory to show Danny where he grew up and how to use his father's hunting rifle. Danny is not at all into this and not particularly good at it either. Off they go into the woods against the wishes of Danny's mother Laura (Megan Leonard) Blah Blah When the action starts things just get a whole lot worse. The story tries to twist and turn but instead trips then stumbles then just falls flat on it's totally clichéd face. Characters are shot at point blank range only to pass out from blood loss then miraculously recover in minutes to be perfectly fine. Blah Blah Enter Bruce Willis, perhaps Bruce can save this confused abomination... Nope, unfortunately at best Bruce appears to be bored and totally disinterested in his character, the script the plot...Blah blah Bruce, Just another B Grade cameo kinda..Blah..as a bad cop. Perhaps Bruce really should let someone who may be a little more committed have a go at this role. It wouldn't have helped the movie but as an actor many of us have very much enjoyed watching over many years it just doesn't sit well. For those of us who consider themselves Bruce Wills fans it's very disappointing. Give it a wide berth.