Mark Reviews Movies: 9 BULLETS

9 Bullets, Screen Media

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 21, 2022

Writer/director Gigi Gaston simply doesn't seem certain about what 9 Bullets is meant to be. At times, it attempts to be a serious drama about wounded, grieving people reaching out for or dismissing connections with others. At other times, the movie is a wacky road trip comedy about the misadventures of a mismatched pair.

Throughout, Gaston's screenplay tries to keep these disparate tones and ideas together by way of a simplistic thriller plot, involving a multi-state chase. The best that can be said of its plotting is that the holes and the filmmaker's clumsy efforts to cross those gaps are equally obvious and amusing.

This movie is a mess of conceits and approaches, but it is at least a reminder that Lena Headey, its star, is capable of holding together and occasionally elevating bad material. The hope is that the effort of making this wildly inconsistent character possess some sort of emotional logic and degree of sympathy is worth it in the near future of her career.

Headey plays Gypsy, a burlesque dancer who attended an Ivy League university a few decades prior and now is ready to retire from performance to write a book. If the main character provides so much conceptual whiplash in just a basic description, one can somewhat imagine that mishmash approach being taken toward an entire movie.

Anyway, Gypsy also has a romantic and professional past with a crime lord out of Utah named Jack (Sam Worthington), who holds grudges—but usually not for long. Take Gypsy's neighbor, for example, who works as an accountant for Jack, steals about million dollars from him, and ends up murdered with his wife and another family member while they're trying to flee. The accountant calls Gypsy for some help in talking down Jack, but she's on other end of the phone when they're brutally killed by a couple of goons. Meanwhile, the accountant's son Sam (Dean Scott Vazquez) witnesses the murders with his little dog and rushes back to Gypsy for help.

Ignore the confusion of Gypsy's relationship to these doomed characters, who are so randomly introduced and briefly anonymous that it's clear they merely exist to set the plot in motion, and instead, let's simply focus on the incongruent reactions to the triple murder. The kid is devastated, obviously, but Gypsy seems incapable of offering even a hint of sympathy.

There's a lot to explain her response, which involves a secret from her past that's left unrevealed for a long stretch (and makes Gypsy's penchant for reckless driving a puzzle, although that's a different story). For the most part, though, her complete disinterest in the kid's grief, his family's vicious murders, and whatever might become of Sam is an excuse to include some forced levity into the unlikely pair's trek from California to an uncle in Montana.

Along the way, the two bicker and gradually bond, before going back to bickering as if nothing has changed. Gypsy makes repeated pit stops to continue writing her book out of hotel rooms and diners (Her publisher wants the manuscript earlier, so there's another a level of unnecessary conflict that goes nowhere), and along the way, Gypsy and Sam are hunted by a trio of Jack's goons, who are unbelievably incompetent on-screen but technical and tactical geniuses off-screen. They find Gypsy everywhere she goes, and some dialogue that was clearly recorded during editing explains away the convenience.

Jack, by the way, is looking for Sam, because he wants to kill the boy, just as he murdered Sam's family. That leads to a particularly bizarre sequence in which Gypsy tries to convince Jack that she doesn't know about Sam's whereabouts and that her old lover/boss shouldn't kill the kid's dog by having some energetic and seemingly tender sex with him.

By the way, Jack's jealous girlfriend, played by Emma Holzer, sets out to avenge the indiscretion, and that subplot seems as if it was filmed as an afterthought. Some other extraneous oddities include an extended episode with a stolen car, which just happens to have a different thief (played by La La Anthony) passed out in the backseat, and a stop to visit a former professor (played by Barbara Hershey), who has the most blatant example of post-filming dialogue to rescue Gypsy from an otherwise impossible situation.

The stakes here might appear to be straightforward, but Gaston almost goes out of the way to undermine, convolute, or confuse them for no reason. For that matter, the whole of 9 Bullets is confused, constantly undermining its intentions and leaving us confounded about its purpose.

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