August 10, 2002
blood work
A serial killer movie. Yeah! And Ebert liked Blood Work. So of course we went to see it yesterday.
And, actually, we liked it. A lot. Despite some flaws. Blood Work is essentially about an FBI agent who, sort of, comes out of retirement after he received a heart transplant in order to find the murderer of the woman who supplied his new ticker. We did figure it out long before Terry (Clint Eastwood) did -- the whodunit part anyway. The whydunit we figured out a little earlier than Our Hero did. But it was still a satisfying movie, nonetheless.
Wanda de Jesus is absolutely stunning -- she played her role superbly, hit all the right notes, and I hope she's in a lot more movies. Angelica Huston hammed it up as usual. As Stanley says, "It's in her genetic make up." I usually like Paul Rodriguez, and would love to see him in a role that doesn't cast him as a Mexican buffoon, but this wasn't it. He was way, way over the top in this movie and struck a very irritating false note. It wasn't that the character couldn't have worked -- it just didn't work the way Rodriguez played him. And Clint was Clint -- he did a great job, I thought, not trying to be a superman, playing it like his transplant HURT, pushing it only as far as someone in his post-transplant condition could. Still picking up the minute details that make some detectives successful where other detectives just go throught the motions. Jeff Daniels, one of my all-time favorites, was damned good, too, as the ne'er-do-well neighbor.
It's funny, but despite the cinematography, which was sun-drenched and looking like those slightly over-saturated snapshots of the sixties, it still left me feeling slightly depressed, a film noir kinda feel. Which was okay. I ignored the very ending, the wrap-up stuff, because that wasn't quite right, either. I'd rate this, hmm, three stars out of five. Might've rated higher without Rodriguez and Huston.
Posted by Lee at August 10, 2002 11:37 AM