| Director: | Matt Eskandari |
| Cinematography: | Bryan Koss |
| Editing: | R.J. Cooper |
| Music: | Rhyan D'Errico |
| Distributor: | Vertical Entertainment[1] |
| Runtime: | 98 minutes[2] |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Gross: | $111,523[3] |
Hard Kill is a 2020 American action thriller film directed by Matt Eskandari, starring Jesse Metcalfe, Bruce Willis, Natalie Eva Marie, Lala Kent, Texas Battle, Swen Temmel, Sergio Rizzulto, Tyler Jon Olson, and Jon Galanis.[4] The film follows a CEO who hires a group of mercenaries to retrieve both a piece of technology and his kidnapped daughter. It was released on August 21, 2020, by Vertical Entertainment, and was critically panned.
Upset that her revolutionary technology will be misused for military purposes, Eva Chalmers approaches an extremist known as the Pardoner, who promises to help her use it to save the world. When she balks at his terrorist plans, he takes her hostage and attempts to coerce her father, Donovan, into revealing the code to activate it. Donovan hires a team of mercenaries led by Derek Miller to rescue Eva and recover the tech.
Principal photography began in January 2020 in Cincinnati,[9] under the working title Open Source.[10] According to the Los Angeles Times and actress Lala Kent, an incident occurred on set when co-star Bruce Willis accidentally fired a prop gun loaded with blanks on the wrong cue and repeated the same error during a second take. Nobody was injured, but the situation reportedly left some crew members "shaken". Hard Kill is one of the last films to star Willis, who retired from acting because he was diagnosed with aphasia.[11]
Hard Kill was simultaneously released in limited theaters and video on-demand in the United States on August 21, 2020.[12] [13] It then became available to stream on Netflix in the USA on November 23, 2020, and was the top streamed film for several weeks.[14]
As of October 29, 2020, Hard Kill grossed $111,523 in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.[3] [15]
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a rare approval rating of 0% based on reviews and an average rating of .[16]
Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter said that Willis "seems to have settled on making listless appearances in forgettable B-movie action movies as a retirement funding plan". He said that although Metcalfe "boasts the appropriate physicality" for his role, he is "unable to summon sufficient charisma to make his character remotely interesting". Scheck called the other performances "equally lackluster" except for Marie, who "makes for a convincing female badass".[17] Kevin Maher of The Times gave the film 1/5 stars, writing: "I can only hope that Bruce Willis managed to squeeze a house out of the producers of this breathtakingly poor mess about a, ahem, 'quantum' military computer program that can either destroy the world or save it."[18]