I try to go into a movie knowing as little as possible, but I’m so glad that I decided to read a bit about 400 Bullets before watching – just a tiny bit of background about the film’s hero made it more enjoyable, put more at stake for the viewer. What would otherwise be a fairly standard movie set in war-time Afghanistan takes on a new dimension. And all because I had somehow never heard of the Ghurka Soldiers. If you haven’t either, take a quick minute to read this.
So, the star of the film, Jean-Paul Ly, plays Rana Rae, a Gurkha soldier who pulls a night shift on a cold, dark Afghanistan winter evening. His job is to guard a British military outpost.
Meanwhile, a rogue group of British special ops folks are trying to put together an illicit deal to sell missile guidance microchips to a heavily armed cell of the Taliban. One man who is not down with the plan, Captain Noah Brandt (Andrew Lee Potts) tries to hide out from both factions and arrives at Rana’s post looking for refuge. What follows is a long, fraught night of the two soldiers fighting to stay alive – and it turns out they are damned good fighters!
And this is where the whole Ghurka thing has its onscreen payoff: the smallish, quiet Rana has been woefully underestimated, and dude is not only a skilled martial artist (Jean-Paul Ly started out as a stuntman and is a noted martial artist) but he also gets to make handy use of his kukri, which is the national weapon of Nepal, and consequently is a characteristic weapon of the Nepalese Army. It looks like this. You might not need 400 bullets if you can use your hands to kick ass.
Now, I enjoy a good fight sequence, and that is really the true appeal of the film. The sort of boilerplate plot is hardly original, it’s just the setup. I didn’t care so much about the setup, but I did dig the payoff.
The cast of British baddies are colorful enough, while Ly is less expressive, but it’s Ly you’ll remember. And if you’re as uneducated as I was, you’ll look at Ly and Ghurkas in a whole new light.
400 Bullets | 2 ½ out of 3 Stars | NR 1 Hr 29 min | Reviewed by Kyle Osborne
