With its snowy location, incompetent crooks, twists of fate and slightly moral lesson on greed, “Blood and Money” has a bit of a Coen brothers feel to it. The filmmakers keep it even until the final moments when they choose an unexpected side. His character’s age, and an unknown sickness that has him coughing up blood, make him far less spry than his nemeses, so his ability to gain and lose the upper hand is a byproduct of whatever side of the luck scale he’s on at the time. Berenger’s no stranger to tracking through a dangerous wilderness-he did it in another crime film, Roger Spottiswoode’s 1988 film “ Shoot to Kill”-so he’s convincing in his outdoor scenes.
Barr does his own cinematography, capturing wide images of the frozen landscape and contrasting them with the craggy, experienced face of his lead. Instead of bagging one buck, Reed now has a bag filled with a million bucks.įrom here, “Blood and Money” becomes a cat and mouse game between Reed and the four remaining heist members. That’s when he discovers the bag next to the body. Realizing he’s left his cigarette in the area, Reed has to go back to retrieve it. Reed tries to get away with involuntary manslaughter, a crime the film tells us he’s committed before, but karma’s first swipe at him appears on TV: His victim is part of a five person crew who robbed a casino before fleeing into the unknown. “You are so f-king dead!” she tells him as she bleeds out. Reed fatally shoots her when he mistakes her for the buck he’s been trying to bag. Regarding the death of the perceived criminal team leader: Her only appearance occurs before the action starts. So when George becomes the film’s sacrificial lamb due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, his demise carries the film’s one true sting. We see George through her description of her marriage before we meet him, which in a way balances him out and gives him some humanity. She’s the nice woman who waits on Reed every day at the diner. Reed realizes he and George have a common tie, George’s wife, Debbie ( Kristen Hager). Reed talks to George, and the younger man seeks his advice. A former Marine and war veteran, Reed meets George at what I assume is an AA meeting, approaching him after George gives a somber speech about trying to reconcile the wartime atrocities he’s seen and done with the peace he desperately seeks at home. The first 30 or so minutes are devoted to Reed’s life and his hunting for deer in isolation. He is scripted well enough to makes you feel for him. Unlike Reed, the most complicated-and nicest-character here is a war veteran named George ( Jimmy LeBlanc). There’s an Old Testament God sense of punishment at play here, where the wages of sin is death regardless of how nice a character is.
BLOOD MONEY MOVIE 1988 CODE
Additionally, since “Blood and Money” takes place in the untamed natural habitat of Northern Maine, its tone seems to mimic nature’s harsh code of survival of the fittest. There’s a line that hints that this is so, in fact. Left to their own devices, they’re a hot mess of mistakes and flawed logic. For example, I concluded that perhaps the real reason the villains were so useless was because the first person Reed took out was the sharpest tool in their shed. These situations inspired more of a response than his character’s frustrations did, because empathy requires three dimensions while schadenfreude only needs one.Īnd yet, there are ideas-depicted and deduced-that show that some care and thought were put into this material.
Berenger effectively curses the gods, screaming profanity into the void while I smirked on my side of the screen. After all, he’s trying to outwit and outrun four violent criminals, yet every time he gets his hands on a weapon, or even a leg up on the enemy, the gun is empty and the advantage is temporarily lost. When karma plays its tricks on Reed, we should be as aggravated as he is about his haplessness. His own motivations remain too vague for us to latch on to him. The film’s antihero, Jim Reed ( Tom Berenger) is more fleshed out, but he’s still rather flat. The villains are so expendable and dumb that they barely even register. More development of character, suspense and plot would have gone a long way toward making this stick to one’s crime genre-loving ribs. If only “Blood and Money” weren’t stretched so thin.
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