Metacritic reviews

The Hollow Point is a blazing contemporary western that finds pleasure in punishment.

Within this uncertain world, Lopéz-Gallego relishes such noir staples as fatalistic shadows, eruptive mayhem and terse, ironic dialogue. But he and his cinematographer, Jose David Montero, also carve out fresh visual territory.

As homage, the film is visually striking, littered with moments of real cinematographic intelligence, and always watchable, in a nasty sort of way, but as a thriller, its ambitions of intensity are thwarted by a plot which becomes increasingly out-there as the twists and turns pile up.

The combined skills of the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, and his cinematographer, José David Montero, can’t surmount a story that gives us no one to invest in.

There are sporadic compensations for your investment of time: Ian McShane’s robust overplaying of an unapologetically scuzzy small-town lawman, John Leguizamo’s dead-serious villainy as a scarily resilient hit man, evocative lensing by David Jose Montero, and a few modestly inventive twists in the otherwise predictable plot.

It knows of its B-movie roots, its tired plot and well-worn archetypes, and beneath the burden of the sorely unoriginal, it does manage to be occasionally funny, occasionally surprising, and occasionally the bloody and bombastic genre cliche it set out to be.

Lyew kills the story with implausible twists, but he does craft some effective, original set pieces.

Gonzalo López-Gallego's direction isn't confident enough to allow us to ignore The Hollow Point's contrivances.

The Hollow Point is such a shameless and indifferent recycling of Nihilistic Crime In The New American West clichés that it feels like it was crafted by committee. A really lazy committee.

The Hollow Point is all hollow, no point.