Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Day To Die’ on Hulu, A Faltering VOD Actioner With A Smattering Of Star Power

A Day to Die (Hulu) is part of the string of films Bruce Willis made in 2021 before his abrupt retirement after revelations became public of his significant cognitive decline. Shot on tight budgets and with an even tighter shooting schedule, these films usually feature the actor as a solitary heavy. He has a little bit more to do in A Day to Die, but the bar is low.

A DAY TO DIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: At the outset of A Day to Die, Connor Connelly (Kevin Dillon), Brice Mason (Frank Grillo) and their elite team of operators are inserted into a tense hostage situation on orders from a police captain named Alston (Bruce Willis) when the whole thing quickly goes south. Eighteen months later, the team has disbanded, Connelly is working a dead-end but dedicated gig as a parole officer, and Alston has been made police chief. Preying on his vulnerability, Connelly is framed for the murder of one of his parolees by drug kingpin Tyrone Pettis (Leon). But Pettis doesn’t stop there. He kidnaps Connelly’s pregnant wife Candace (Brooke Butler) and forces the disgraced officer to rob a drug house and deliver the two million-dollar take to him, or else. Desperate, Connelly calls his old crew for a little help, and his brother Tim (Gianni Capaldi), Mason, Dwayne (Vernon Davis), and Steve (Alexander Kane) assemble.

Pettis isn’t just a drug dealer. He’s also in cahoots with Alston, whose political aspirations he funds in return for police protection and a shared skim of the drug profits. The house he’s forcing Connelly to hit? It’s run by his main competition on the streets, and Pettis is tired of Alston dipping into that honey, too. If this plays right, he’ll have eliminated his rival’s operation, squeezed Alston for leverage, and consolidated his standing as the city’s biggest crime boss.

Once Connelly, Mason and the rest of the team have hit the target, it’s time to deliver the loot to Pettis and free Candace from his clutches. The idea is, they’ll do his dirty work and disappear from town forever, keeping them off of Pettis and Alston’s radar. But of course, it doesn’t work out that way. Shootouts ensue, and before long, the drug kingpin and the disgraced cop are thrown together in an improvised plan to rid themselves and the city of Alston’s meddling once and for all.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In Gasoline Alley, the quickie noir he made right before A Day to Die, Bruce Willis played a corrupt police detective. Here — are you sensing a pattern — he plays a corrupt police chief. And in 2016, he made Marauders alongside Christopher Meloni and Dave Bautista, a convoluted crime thriller with some similarities to A Day to Die. What did Willis play? A corrupt CEO.

Performance Worth Watching: Veteran actor Leon Robinson — just Leon, if you please — is doing his best to elevate Tyrone Pettis above the gappy plotting of A Day to Die. He adds the right measure of spice to so many of the character’s stock bad guy boss lines, and inhabits Pettis’s designer threads and refined tastes with a subtle twinkle in his eye.

Memorable Dialogue: Even in sub-standard genre fare like A Day to Die, Frank Grillo, jaded grimace in place, manages to punch up his lines. “When everything is on the fucking line and you gtta make a decision between death and death, there are no wrong choices. None.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: A Day to Die never really recovers from a choppy, confusing opening sequence that’s theoretically its narrative foundation but falters practically. It throws a bunch of characters at us in the darkness — including Bruce Willis, muttering a few directionless lines — and thrusts them into a violent and tactically misguided hostage rescue attempt full of awkwardly applied CGI blood spatters and a helicopter crash that looks to be engineered from Fisher-Price parts. That the events of this sequence are supposed to be the emotional trigger for what comes later further mires in mud the story A Day to Die wants to tell.

Willis does have a few more lines in this than what’s become normal for these VOD entries. But it’s telling that a lot of them are literally phoned in — more than once, he’s only heard and not seen, spouting exposition in a phone call. And while Kevin Dillon, Grillo, and Leon generate some gravity for their characters to land on, it’s not powerful enough to sustain interest in the muddled plotting of A Day to Die and a chaotic finale, lifted from Heat, that returns to the confusion of the film’s early moments.

Our Call: SKIP IT. A Day to Die can’t connect its aggressive action elements and sporadic bits of genre film cohesion to a plot that never finds its footing.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges