Killing Field review – Bruce Willis murders his own reputation once again

A smug-faced Willis takes down his own star status and an assortment of drug smuggling villains in this painful, unoriginal action thriller

Bruce Willis continues his campaign of reputation self-ruin – not that he has that far to fall – with this cruddy, derivative action thriller that pits two cops – one being Willis, the other Swen Temmel – and a bereaved war veteran played by Chad Michael Murray, against an eclectic assortment of drug smuggling miscreants. In a semi-tropical rural locale somewhere in the southern US (Puerto Rico served as the actual location), cops David (Willis) and Cal (Temmel) make a mess of busting some drug dealers. Although David gets injured and caught by the miscreants, Cal hares off after Violet (Kate Katzman, ripping off Margot Robbie’s bleached foundation and dark lipstick look from The Suicide Squad) and her super-violent bottle-blond boyfriend (Zack Ward). They end up at the farmhouse of Eric (Murray), who recently managed to kill his wife and young daughter in a car crash by not keeping his eyes on the road. Although obviously a terrible driver, Eric isn’t such a bad shot and soon he teams up with Cal to save David by taking down the bad guys, whose numbers keep increasing for the first half of the film, and then decreasing in the second as they’re picked off.

Willis does a lot of sitting around being handcuffed while bleeding, which nevertheless fails to wipe that permanent smug sneer off his face. The endless bouts of fisticuffs and gunplay are interspersed with fitful plot padding and grim attempts at banter between assorted groups of characters – but never more than five at once because that would presumably have been too expensive. The constant soundtrack of bland, light metal guitar thrashing just adds to the pain.

• Killing Field is released on 17 January on digital platforms.