Metacritic reviews

The blood-soaked potboiler First Kill is Generous Pour through and through, from Bruce Willis playing a cop for the umpteenth time in his career to the old switcheroo we can see coming a mile away to the pounding and overwrought score to some genuinely effective detours and subplots.

The movie, directed by Steven C. Miller, doesn’t hold a lot of surprises, but there is worse terror-in-the-woods fare out there — rather a lot of it, in fact.

Christensen is impressive as a man who uses his wits and keeps cool. His straight-faced dedication is quite the contrast to the blatant disgust Willis reveals in his performance (and, really, for the whole movie). This actually makes First Kill a surprisingly fascinating study of two leading actors.

Frankly, if forced to bet between John McClane and Anakin Skywalker, I’d take the “Die Hard” tough guy every time, but that’s just the underdog factor Miller is going for, staging a reasonably entertaining series of off-road chases and backwoods shootouts en route to that final confrontation.

Lacking any vibrancy, wit, or formal rigor, First Kill is not only as bland and leaden as its über-generic title suggests, it's downright sloppy to boot.

It’s all pretty tedious, with Miller failing to infuse the proceedings with the stylistic flair necessary to compensate for the cliché-ridden plotline, whose twists can be seen a mile away.

Every character states their inner motivation out loud, often without prompting, making for a film that loses its intrigue almost immediately.