One of the first movies I ever wrote about was Walter Hill’s “The Warriors,” his third feature, which came out when I was in college and which I reviewed for the Daily Princetonian. I haven’t seen it since that press screening in early 1979, but I remember being impressed by the suddenness of its violence: the way that a small, single gesture became the spark of mayhem. (I think I likened one incendiary scene to the climactic shootout in Fritz Lang’s “Moonfleet.”) The same striking quality is in ample evidence from the very beginning of Hill’s “Bullet to the Head,” which opens with a black-and-white sequence (a frame for a flashback) where a blood-spattering rescue arrives with a still, sudden shock. And the seventy-one-year-old director yokes that art of laconic explosiveness to a star, Sylvester Stallone, who, now sixty-six, walks with a heavy, tilted tread and delivers dialogue with the phlegmatic might of a steamroller on gravel.

Stallone is an old-school movie star; unlike modern actors, he is opaque. Rather than convey the impression that he feels the emotions of his characters, he conjures emotion with behavior, gestures, and expressions that remain on the outside like masks. That’s why he’s also a walking bundle of nostalgic kitsch, and has been so from the beginning. In making “Rocky,” he had the insight to market his qualities to a bewildered audience desperate for a toehold on vestigial verities—for the Second World War–centered white, working-class, physically tough heroism of which living legends were made—a young extrusion of Archie Bunker who’d be no bigot, no couch potato, no fool, and no subject of satire.

As an irony-free actor, Stallone has always been on the edge of self-parody; he’s a walking hyperbole, and, as with all classic-era movie actors, his essential qualities come through even more strongly and clearly in stasis than in action. Hill films Stallone with a stolid, stony minimalism that meshes perfectly with the movie’s offhanded humor and gives its mayhem a surprisingly benign tint. The story casts him as James Bonomo, a.k.a. Jimmy Bobo, a hit man guided by two main principles: an unfailing sense of loyalty and an underlying sense of self-justification (“The people I work for are shit; the people I take out are worse.”). They join with a ferocious, farsighted sense of self-preservation, rooted in an awesome set of military skills. The plot, set in New Orleans, catches Jimmy at the moment these three elements converge: when Jimmy and his partner go to collect their money after a job, the partner is killed and Jimmy seeks revenge (“We did our job and we were set up.”). Meanwhile, their victim turns out to have been a Washington, D.C., police officer, whose former partner, Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang), seeks out Jimmy. After Jimmy saves his life, however, he teams up with him to untangle the plot ever higher up the ladder, finally reaching some high-level politicians and their chicanery, which, as in “Broken City,” centers on a nefarious scheme to tear down housing projects and replace them with a luxury developments.

Stallone is having the time of his life, not least with the script’s buddy comedy, its plethora of cringe-inducing gags regarding stereotypes of Asians (“put some pow in your pencil” is one that comes to mind), and pugnaciously sardonic one-liners delivered with infinitesimal sneers and fractionally arched eyebrows. He was having a great time in his own “The Expendables,” from 2010; there his swagger seemed hyperkinetic, and his glee in violence and its effects seemed oblivious. Here, under Hill’s tight and perceptive direction, Stallone’s actorly intelligence and charisma come to the fore—the less he does, the wiser and deeper it appears—and yet “Bullet to the Head” packs an even more terrifying resonance, one that’s all the more forbidding if it’s intentional.

What happens here is a major scandal of political corruption, one that threatens the livelihoods of thousands of poor people and reaches all the way to Washington. Elected officials and police officers are in on the plot, which musters the talents of other contract killers to enforce it at street level. In effect, the fabulous armamentarium that Jimmy Bobo maintains is the fundamental means of resistance for ordinary citizens against a government and its misdeeds. Some smart politicians and related cronies had the idea to hire low-level criminals as unwitting agents and then to dispose of them conveniently; one of these criminals, Bobo, is smart enough to catch on, strong enough to hold out, and tough enough to fight back. “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen,” Woody Guthrie sang (in “Pretty Boy Floyd”), and “Bullet to the Head” is the story of bearing and keeping arms for purposes unrelated to a well-regulated militia and altogether connected to the ultimate, if veiled and limited, prospect of fighting back against the government.

But the politics of the movie are not even symbolic, and their canting thinness is revealed at exactly the same moment Stallone’s own limits are reached and the stonelike mask of his persona dissolves. At the end of the film, Hill (and the screenwriter, Alessandro Camon) send the actor a bridge too far, giving him a one-liner that thrusts him into a showdown with the one gunslinger no one should face alone: when Bobo, in response to an earnest warning from Kwon, says, “That’ll be the day.” It is, of course, John Wayne’s iconic line from John Ford’s “The Searchers” (with which the script of Hill’s film shares a few superficial traits), the line of a lone gunman who can’t belong to the society that he serves, who helps to create a world that has no place for him. Against the mythical power and grand moral anguish of Ford’s world, and of Wayne’s implacable, poignant place in it, Stallone’s performance—which, to that point, had been successfully put over by Hill as that of a survivor restored, his force emerging from the past—is reduced to a copy of a copy, a nostalgia for nostalgia, a gathering of superficial traits built up around an empty core, a mask with nothing behind it. And all this because the audacious politics that are central to this vigorously engaging film have been pushed to the side, below the surface, and away from consideration.