By Charly SHELTON

Sylvester Stallone is old. There is no way to argue it. His years of being a beefed-out muscle head actor have caught up with him and he is showing signs of age. That being said, he is still in better shape now than I am in my prime and he can still kick butt like he did in his younger days. Though he may be looking old, it isn’t slowing him down a bit.

“Bullet to the Head” is Sly’s newest action film. He plays Jimmy Bobo, an aging hit man with a young partner. Their most recent hit has gone off well. Nobody is the wiser, the guy is dead and the assassins are in the wind. But then something turns sour. Jimmy’s partner is murdered to cover up their employer’s tracks, and Jimmy is attacked but won’t go down as easily. When he traces the double cross back, he finds it goes all the way up: all the way to Washington.

Along for the ride is renegade police officer (…) who John McClanes his way into New Orleans and winds up, along with Jimmy, running for his life from a corrupt police system that is sitting in a gangster’s pocket. The bad guys are bad. The good guys are worse. There is no one to turn to. It’s up to Jimmy Bobo and (…) to take down the crime syndicate proving, as the tag line for the film says, revenge never gets old.

I walked into this film ready to hate it. Having seen the trailer, I thought it was just another dumb shoot-’em-up film with a sad old action star grasping at straws for his last bit of career that “The Expendables” gave him via nostalgia from audiences. I was wrong.

Sly still has it. It’s not the same as it was when he was younger, but it’s still there, though he is grappling with age. It’s not so easy to pop back up after the explosion knocks him down. He can’t take a beating like he used to, so he has to hit the bad guy without getting hit himself. It adds a whole new dimension to the characters he plays in this stage of his life. And much like the Die Hard 4 and the upcoming Die Hard 5 films of Bruce Willis have more than made up for the jokes of the previous two Die Hard films, Stallone is earning respect for this stage of his life and career, firmly cementing himself once again as an action hero.

Rated R for violence, nudity, language and a whole slew of other reasons, I give this film 4 out of 5 stars.