When the Bullet Hits the Bone is a 1996 Canadian action thriller film written, produced and directed by Damian Lee, starring Jeff Wincott, Michelle Johnson, Douglas O'Keeffe and Torri Higginson.

It concerns a doctor who turns vigilante after nearly dying in a gang-related shooting, only to discover a vast conspiracy linking the government to the importation of narcotics.

Mentally affected by the aftermath of drug-induced violence he had been witnessing at his hospital, emergency doctor Jack Davies errs in the streets of New York in a drunken stupor.

Davies, who is deemed an undesirable witness, gets shot as well when he fails to answer a history question asked by Daemon, the lead henchman and a sadist who likes to torment his victims with increasingly difficult trivia before he kills them.

As he lay in the street bleeding, Davies has an epiphany and decides to drop his identification cards into a nearby manhole, so as to become anonymous and signify the end of his previous life.

[3] TV Guide's Charles Cassady surmised that the film's premise was inspired by a series of articles published by the San Jose Mercury News, which accused the Reagan administration of allowing the importation of drugs into the U.S. to finance the Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s.

Writing for the Knight Ridder family of publications, Randy Myers panned the film as "a really bad doctor flick", "sloppily made and boring", and negatively compared it to another Canadian-shot medical thriller released the same week in the U.S., The Surgeon.

[21] The BBC's Radio Times deemed it "violent but unerringly predictable", adding that "scripting [was] lazy" and finding Wincott's character "implausible".

[22] Canadian media watchdog Médiafilm, historically close to the Catholic church, criticized the film's "gratuitous violence" and "unrefined direction".

[23] TV Guide lambasted the film, saying: "a simplistic script, an almost non-existent budget and laughable execution [...] make When the Bullet Hits the Bone a shambles of a straight-to-video action flick.

"[4][24] While Ballantine Books' Video Movie Guide wrote that "Star Jeff Wincott has done so many of these lone-avenger films it’s almost hard to tell them one from the other",[25] Videohound found it to be a "[p]articularly nasty vigilante flick".