Cold Blood

When I saw Jean Reno in the credits it gave me hope but it seems he is just acting now for the money as his performance was lugubrious and seemed uninterested in anything but picking up a cheque. The story was not fleshed out enough and we were given just a bare bones skeleton without much characterization and not even much action either; mostly just long winter shots of the Ukrainian mountains, which although beautiful does not make a movie. I struggle to give this even a 3 out of 10 it is really quite boring as most of the other reviewers have already stated!

The tundra was stunning, but the story lacked any answers. Very disappointed with the script and ending. 2 hrs of my life I will never get back.

Jean Reno gives here another LEON, as Luc Besson will, in a few months; give us ANNA, another NIKITA...So, you see, old schemes come back one way or another. This story is good enough for me because I love those topics of lonely hitmen, who know that they have to fight for something lost in advance. Remember Jim Jarmush's GHOST DOG, Besson,'s LEON, or Jean Pierre Melville's LE SAMOURAI...This very film here is not a masterpiece, but a pretty good grade B picture.

Beautiful winter landscapes, at the edge of an isolated lake in the great North American. Here are the positives! Otherwise: the dialogues are ridiculous, the ending is predictable, the script is pathetically not credible and was obviously written with a hangover. What a boring movie that will probably disappear from the movie theaters within one week, two at most. So if you want to waste 90 minutes, hurry up!

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source: Cold Blood

source: Cold Blood

The cinematography is stunning. There is a nice pace set at the start of the story. But then the story goes absolutely nowhere. The story seems to be about an assassin hired to kill a rich man. The assassination seems to be part of a really hostile takeover. (Why didn't the rival company just buy out the rich man's company like Edward Lewis does in "Pretty Woman" and then take it apart? The assassination seems to be an extreme alternative). So the assassination takes about two minutes and the assassin gets paid. But the rich victim appears to have an heir, who gets the company which will prevent the takeover. The heir is an only child who everyone believes is a boy but is really a girl. The assassin (Henry) seems to also have a contract to assassinate the rich man's heir, but the assassin doesn't know the identity or location of the heir--so he goes ice fishing in a lonely wilderness. (Huh?) Meanwhile, a hard-bitten detective appears to be looking for the trail of the assassin, but then the detective's partner appears to transfer out immediately at that point. The investigation seems to go nowhere until the detective learns that the heir he thought was a boy (Charlie) turns out to be a girl (Charlie). Somehow this seems to put the detective on the right trail. Charlie appears to be on the run from danger, but as it turns out, she seems to have been trained in martial arts. Somehow she is on a quest to get revenge for her daddy's murder. This is strange, because she seems to not have known her father, who sent her to a boarding school for her whole life. The girl's closest relationship was with her father's personal assistant-who appeared to care nothing for her either and was just following her father's orders. She was raised with a boy who appears to have martial arts skills too but also does not demonstrate any affection for the girl on his part. Charlie has picked up the trail of the assassin, and heads to the lonely frozen wilderness. Somehow, just before she arrives, she has a horrific accident on the snow bike and collapses outside Henry's cabin. The assassin nurses her back to health. As soon as she recovers, she tries to shoot him In the back of the head. (That's gratitude for you). Henry then tortures her by placing an incredibly heavy log on her already injured legs. Somehow he is insulted when she calls it torture. She reveals that she seeks to revenge the death of her father-which fact Henry seems to have guessed anyway. So she asks Henry why he hasn't killed her. For no apparent reason at all, Henry refers her to Sun Tzu's "The Art of War"--an ancient Chinese military treatise. She is understandably confused. Maybe he's going to train her like Leon Montana teaches Mathilda Lando in "The Professional"? She clearly is quite inept at the assassin business. No such luck, however. He gives her additional (unwanted) advice by telling her that a local wolf has tasted her blood and that she must shoot the wolf. The boy, after expertly locating the girl in the wilderness, shows up in the dead of night and shoots wildly in the cabin windows-for no apparent reason. The assassin stalks him, then takes him out in a conflict that takes maybe two minutes. There is no apparent good reason for this scene to be part of the story. Finally, the girl is running to the woods and the assassin is chasing her but firing his weapon aimlessly into the sky-perhaps to keep the wolf away? Who knows? Or cares by this point? The detective shows up and shoots the assassin. The story ends, but we don't care about the assassin, the boy, the girl or the detective. (Perhaps we care about the poor wolf-who makes a cameo appearance but does not appear to have been bothering anyone, so we are glad).

A big fan of Jean Reno I am but this wasn't that good and was just too slow. It's also a rehash and similar to other movies. Most notably I found it similar to Polar with Mads Mikellson except that Polar was far far better than this movie. This one is just okay and far from Reno's best work, it's certainly no Leon that's for sure, on the other hand I dearly hope we see a sequel to Polar.

I know that the film was shot in several countries and that the accents were so mish mashed that the filmmaker should have done one thing. He should have allowed the location to be in the Ukraine or at least keep with the European flavour. There are enough films pretending to be where they are not and the actors who try to sound like they are American, failed miserably. It would have made the film much more appealing if the setting was outside of the so called US of A, and the actors accents would not have been a problem.