'BULLET IN THE FACE'

Ok ....... is it the most violent 30 minutes of comedy on the TV ?

Well, it's up there with shows like 'Death Valley' and 'Eagleheart'.

The violence is certainly there — blood sprays liberally, and the premise of the show is built around a man shot in the face on two different occasions — but that violence is so cartoonish as to almost be benign. There’s nothing ghastly or intense about the bloodshed, and there is so little investment in any of the characters that their eventual bullet-riddled bodies affect no emotion.

That’s not to say that Bullet in the Face is not without some fun. It can be ridiculous, and ridiculously fun (especially when Eddie Izzard is onscreen).

It was announced that the series would be condensed, changed from a six-part weekly series into a two-night event, seemingly meant to sweep the series under the rug without actually having to kill a series that’d already been produced and filmed.



The show stars Max Williams as Gunter Vogler, the muscle for Heinrich Tannhauser (Eddie Izzard), a crime lord engaged in a mob war with the head of another crime family (Eric Roberts). Tannhauser, however, discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man and asks that Gunter kill her. The rub, however, is that the other man is Gunter, and before Gunter can take out Tannhauser’s wife/his mistress — who is pregnant with Gunter’s child — she shoots him in face.

Gunter wakes up three months later only to discover that, after a transplant, he now has the face of a cop that he had shot before he had himself been shot in the face. The police department had given him a transplant in an effort to use him to get inside the Tannhauser syndicate and take it down from the inside. Gunter, who knows nothing but violence, is hesitant to agree (“I will not live my life with some other face I do not recognize. I am not Mickey Rourke.”), but ultimately does so after discovering that his old boss and his mistress both want him dead.

The exaggerated nature of the show, the bad German accents, and the over-the-top violence aside, the opening episode is a strong one, intentionally bad-funny. It’s when the show escapes from the series arc and devolves into an absurd case-of-the-week procedural that Bullet in the Face becomes wearying.

Still, it's nice to see Eddie Izzard back on the box.