Blood Work

Well, I caught Clint Eastwood’s latest, Blood Work, the other day. Not a bad idea for a film, and for the most part it wasn’t all that badly done. But there were a couple of glaring exceptions, one of which nearly wrecks the film. First, and this is probably not an annoyance to most, was the inclusion of comedian (and that is a term I use loosely) Paul Rodriguez as a big-mouthed annoying detective. Admittedly, he is perfectly typecast as big-mouthed and annoying, but he was just too much for me to take. Every time the guy showed up on the screen, I knew I was in for another lesson in how to do everything wrong as an actor in a major motion picture.

But the big issue in this movie was the fact that I had the killer figured out from about halfway through the movie. And no, I’m not a genius or psychic, it is just one of those movies where you get that feeling as soon as the character walks onto the screen that that person is going to be trouble. OK, yes I know, in every movie involving a murderer, there is at least some chance of guessing who it is, even if it isn’t obvious. But in this case, the producers obviously thought their killer was a bit too easy to figure, so they included a scene to throw we the audience off the track. Normally smart, but I this case, if you had been focusing on the killer from early in the film, and this scene temporarily threw you off like it did me, then you would have been really distressed to learn that you had fooled at the end of the movie. Fooled really isn’t the best word here. Cheated is more like it. Because, without giving anything away, the scene (designed to throw us off) in which the then-unknown killer interacts with Eastwood’s character, is a scene that the killer couldn’t possibly have involved in. Confused? So were the writers of this movie. Essentially they added a scenario to the movie that wasn’t logically possible. I suppose they could have explained it away somehow, but they didn't. Which says to me that someone was hoping that the audience was going to be paying more attention to their popcorn than what was going on up on the screen. I know my reasoning sounds more than a little confusing, but I want to avoid ruining the movie for anyone.

Bottom line. Blood Work would have been a better movie had someone involved noticed this glaring leap in logic.