Mark Reviews Movies: COLD BLOOD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 4, 2019

With Cold Blood, writer/director Frédéric Petitjean banks on the idea that we'll find something worthwhile in the mere presence of Jean Reno as an aged and now seemingly retired hitman. The screenplay certainly doesn't provide Reno's retired hitman with any depth, save for the fact that he has killed many people and is now kind of done with that work, or with many scenes of any significance.

The apparent thinking behind this marriage of a recognizable actor with a hollow characters is that, a quarter of a century ago, Reno played a hitman in a movie that became a cult favorite. There is absolutely no narrative connection between this movie and The Professional (aka, Léon), but Petitjean certainly wants us to make such an association.

This sort of stunt casting can work, as long as the new role has something to say about the character(s) for which an actor is best known. Here, though, it's almost as if, after casting his star, the filmmaker simply gave up on the idea of creating a character who stands on his own (or, for that matter, a movie that does), hoping that some removed sense of nostalgia on the part of the audience would compensate.

Instead, we get the story of Melody (Sarah Lind), a mysterious woman who crashes her snowmobile near the isolated cabin somewhere in Washington state, where Henry, Reno's character, in now living. In a prologue, Henry kills a business mogul in New York City and is now evading justice and/or revenge. Meanwhile, two groups are seemingly searching for Henry: the mogul's associates and, for reasons that make absolutely no sense, the local Sheriff's department.

There's a strange sense that Petitjean doesn't trust the potential of his central characters, since the true nature of their relationship is kept a not-so-secret mystery until the third act. The screenplay spends a lot of time on the hunt, which introduces us to a bevy of supporting and one-scene characters whose dialects (spoken and dubbed) run the geographically inaccurate gamut of a cobbled-together production.

By the time the most important revelation comes to light, Petitjean bypasses the emotional core of one character and the potential for some additional layer within Henry for an expository flashback and an obligatory, unconvincing game of cat-and-mouse in the woods. Indeed, the whole of Cold Blood could be described that way: obligatory and unconvincing.

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