400 Bullets (2021) Review

Directed By: Tom Paton

Starring: Andrew Lee Potts, Jean Paul Ly, James Warren

Synopsis: One cold winter night in Afghanistan is about to get a whole lot worse for Rana Rae (Jean-Paul Ly), a Gurkha soldier left to guard a British military outpost, when Captain Noah Brandt (Andrew Lee Potts) arrives looking for refuge from a group of rogue special ops and a cell of heavily armed Taliban. The two soldiers must fight for their lives as they attempt to call for backup before the rogue squad, led by the backstabbing Sergeant Bartlett (James Warren), can hunt them down to retrieve a case of missile guidance chips that Noah intercepted. But Bartlett and his men do not count on Rana, whose ferocious Gurkha training makes him a force to be reckoned with. Rana and Noah, armed with only 400 bullets and the Gurkha’s deadly weapon of choice – the kukri blade – must battle their way through multiple enemies in a brutal showdown to the death in the film’s jaw-dropping finale.

Review: 400 Bullets will catch your attention with having Jean Paul Ly on the cover. Jean Paul has been involved in some great projects and more recently, he was involved in the violent short movie titled ACÉRÉ which show-cased how great Jean Paul Ly can be.

Unfortunately 400 Bullets was rather boring and quite dull. Jean Paul Ly was wasted in this movie – the action scenes weren’t great. It mainly consisted of good guy – bad guy shootouts, maybe a couple of metres apart, fully auto shooting at eachother and hitting nothing… (3 clips later they might just about hit a vehicle or a light nearby….). Another scene when Andrew Lee Potts is on the radio, for what felt like an eternity, we see muzzle flashes behind him, yet the walls around him aren’t getting hit… He’s not even flinching! And really, if the bad guys just moved a couple of metres to the right, they would have definitely seen him. It all comes across very lazy, and daft, to be frank.

The lead actor Andrew Lee Potts didn’t really standout as his character. He comes across as the guy in the background that gets killed off. In fairness though, I did not feel any connection with any of the characters – I found myself checking the timing regularly to see how long was left…

The hand to hand fight scenes were nothing spectacular – again, they felt lazy and a bit rushed.

Overall, 400 Bullets is forgettable!