Review: Blood Money

Three college-age, long-time friends (Ellar Coltrane, Willa Fitzgerald, Jacob Artist) have their bonds – and morality – tested on a camping trip. Fitzgerald finds several duffle bags full of money by a riverbank. She and Artist (whom she’s been sleeping with) want to keep the money, whilst Coltrane (who still harbours feelings for Fitzgerald after a one-time hook-up ages ago) thinks they should turn it in. Then along comes John Cusack, who is looking for the $8 million himself. He’s the one who put the money in the bags and parachuted it out of a plane in the first place. He doesn’t have any time for anyone’s whiny bullshit, he wants his damn money back. Let the bickering and mind games begin.

 

After the offbeat and amusing “May”, I assumed a great new genre talent had been found in director Lucky McKee. He hasn’t really delivered on that promise since (“The Woman” seemed to get wildly mixed reviews), let alone raised his stock in the industry all that much since the 2002 horror film that brought him to one’s attention. This unlikeable, clichéd affair is the pits and feels as though McKee was a mere director-for-hire, as the material certainly doesn’t seem like his kind of thing. It’s a film about dirty money and greed, but much more of a crime-thriller than anything horror or cult-y like McKee’s other work.

 

The screenplay is definitely a big problem here. Scripted by Jared Butler (a voice actor with his debut script) and Lars Norberg (whose only other writing credit is a Swedish film from 2001) it’s full of unlikeable characters, clichéd yet unlikely situations, absolutely tedious dialogue, and a deadly slow pace. It’s only after 25 excruciating minutes that traces of the plot start to emerge. Unfortunately, none of it is believable. Under no circumstances did I believe that the characters we’re presented with at the outset would have any interest in the funny money. Yes, we find out more about them later on that reveals a darker nature about at least one of the main characters, but that feels inorganic too. It feels like the writers deliberately withhold information from us in order to make the twists and turns work but botch it. The twists and turns don’t work because one doesn’t believe in them and we don’t know these people enough to begin with in order to care anyway. Since John Cusack plays a total creep, you don’t care about him, either. Who, where, and in what was the audience investment supposed to be?

 

The performances are pretty terrible too, with Willa Fitzgerald the best of the bunch but even she descends into phony overacting by the home stretch too. She believes the trajectory of her character about as much as I did: Not at all. Her motivations and dialogue in the back end are truly stupid (one speech about puberty and male possessiveness seems to come from another film entirely), and the actress can’t help but go way overboard. As for the continually slumming John Cusack, he spends the entire film looking to be going through a crushing depression. I don’t think he wants to be here and he’s very hard to watch.

 

I just don’t see what McKee saw in this script that made him feel like he had to direct it. A complete mess, though I lay most of the blame with the scripting and acting than with the direction. Good-looking, but pretty worthless blend of “The River Wild” and a shit version of “A Simple Plan” (or “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” if you prefer Bogey to Bill Paxton).

 

Rating: D