Judging
from this film, one of the two credited co-screenwriters must have had one
nasty breakup recently, because their protagonist is no mere femme fatale. She
is a stone-cold mercenary viper. At least she sot of makes things interesting.
Plus, for extra added VODness, there is John Cusack playing the whiny, motivationally
challenged villain in Lucky McKee’s Blood
Money (trailer
here), which
releases today on DVD.
Late
in their senior year, Lynn briefly hooked up with her torch-carrying, dirt-poor
platonic guy pal, Victor, but she has recently been seeing her other high school
bestie dude, Jeff. While she is home from college, the trio decided to take a
rafting trip together, because doesn’t that just sound like a super-fun time? Victor
was already getting sick of it, before Lynn found eight million dollars stuffed
in matching duffel bags. Of course, she wants to keep it and Jeff is too
spineless to argue, but Victor wants to turn it over to the cops. Evidently, he
is the only one of them who has seen A
Simple Plan.
As
you would expect, the man who packed that luggage wants it back. That would be
Miller, a white collar D.B. Cooper wannabe, trying to set himself up
off-the-grid, in style. Unfortunately, he will have to pry her cold, grubby
hands off it.
Supposedly,
Blood Money was intended as a loose
riff on Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
but that’s just crazy talk. Frankly,
this is a complete car crash of a movie, for many reasons, not the least being
the ostensive villain spends the first half of the film laying on a picnic
table, pining for a cigarette. By the time old Miller starts dispensing 1970s
psycho-babble relationship advice to an oblivious Victor, we know this train is
hurtling off the bridge. The only question is how much hang-time will it
record. Unfortunately, stuff doesn’t really start to happen until about the
fifty-minute mark, so that means we have to wait an interminably long time,
while the characters just sit around, awkwardly looking at each other.
Forget
what critics said about The Paperboy.
John Cusack was terrible as the bad guy in that film, just like he looks
completely out of place as Miller, the antagonist-heavy, but the character is
such a nebbish villain, he is perversely suited to it. Admittedly, Willa
Fitzgerald is all kinds of fierce as Lynn. She came to play, that’s for sure.
On the other hand, Ellar Coltrane and Jacob Artist give Victor and Jeff
personalities of cardboard, and co-screenwriters Jared Butler and Lars Norberg endowed
them the intuition of damp lint.
Still,
you have to feel for Butler or Norberg, because one of them most of had his
heart eviscerated. That’s the only way to write a character like Lynn. What can
we say? Love stinks, yeah, yeah. In this case, it takes a ponderous excuse for
a wilderness survival thriller and gives it an elephant syringe full of
adrenaline through the breastplate in the final twenty-minutes. That is
something, but it is baffling how a notable horror-genre helmer like McKee
could let the film wallow in lethargy for so long.
