Blood is a Friends Divided By Murder-Guilt Drama. If you haven’t seen one of these – Shallow Grave, Very Bad Things etc – the strength of the cast (Paul Bettany, Stephen Graham, Mark Strong, Brian Cox) is enough for a very slight recommendation, and if a Sad Police Murder story starring four of the most accomplished British Indie actors of the age is inviting to you, by all means check the film out, and stop reading this review now for fear of spoilers.
For anyone who has encountered this well-worn ‘murder followed by paranoia followed by net-closing-in’ structure (or frankly anyone who’s even slightly film-literate), Blood is a plodding, frustratingly unoriginal film, whose total adherence to this tired formula left me impatient for the film to just hurry up and get to where I already knew it was going.
Paul Bettany plays Joe Fairburn, a haunted bobby with a cold rage-on for justice. After the suspected murderer of a young girl appears set to walk free, Joe and his brother Lenny (Stephan Graham) take him to ‘the islands’ a place offhandedly recommended for torturing scum by their retired police chief, alzheimer-suffering father (Brian Cox). Push comes to shovel-to-the-head and now Joe and Lenny must cover their tracks before their own police comrades start investigating them. Of course the beta brother “can’t take the guilt”, the alpha brother goes mad, and the film pads its running time with terse family tears until the inevitable conclusion.
The film’s main theme of A Family Divided is unfortunately hobbled from the start, however, as the main brothers are notably miscast. Stephen Graham convinces enough, but Paul Bettany is all wrong here, the physical difference between his tall blonde and Graham’s short brunette exacerbated by Bettany’s attempted London accent never fully covering his clipped RP drawl. They never appear like a cohesive family unit, so there’s not much to tear apart, lessening the weight of the drama from the get go.
It also doesn’t help that film has the wrong protagonist in Bettany’s Joe. A better lead would have been Mark Strong’s loner copper (who we’re told is a loner but spends the establishing moments of the film making easy banter with his fellow co-workers) who slowly tightens the net around Joe and Lenny. His scenes are more interesting because its from his character’s perspective that the Fairburn family actually has any weight. He’s a mistreated, introverted outsider investigating an entire family of policemen, watching each other’s backs and some of the best bits of the film see him tiptoe across the boundaries of social acceptability in trying to gain clues from Joe’s friends and family members. Following Strong’s character might have given the whole film as sense of tension, the Fairburn family seeming a lot more convincing as a unit from without rather than from within. Instead, we’re left to follow Joe who simply does the generic ‘mad with guilt’ thing of lashing out at everyone close to him, fidgeting, hitting the bottle and constantly being one orchestral sting away from bursting into tears. It’s a one-note performance stretched out interminably, whereas Strong’s scant tale of a sidelined man gaining confidence whilst piecemeal taking down a corrupt copper family would have really benefited from the extra screentime.
There’s an really interesting 15 minutes stretch of the film, however. After murdering the prime suspect, Joe discovers that it couldn’t have been him because his alibi seems to check out and for a brief moment, the film becomes a whodunnit wherein Joe is forced to keep investigating the girl’s murder, not knowing if he’s killed the right guy, or if the real killer’s just around the corner, or if he’s a hair’s breadth from being brought down by his own investigation. That is great. An interesting, but more importantly, unpredictable dynamic, because we as the audience don’t have all the facts. We don’t know who the killer is, so we can’t be sure if Joe is entirely damned or what the next plot beat will bring. Sure enough however, they find the real killer in the next scene so now we as the audience know everything, and we spend the rest of the film looking at our watch waiting for Mark Strong to get on with it and close the net. This frustration is multiplied tenfold by the fact that Paul Bettany spends the entirety of the film looking impossibly guilty, hunched over like the world’s most stricken gargoyle, smoking his murderer’s cigarettes with an I Just Straight Up Killed A Guy expression on his sad-sack face.
And speaking of sad, my god the film’s dour. Scenes of cloudy beaches melt into scenes of granite crime scenes, into cloudy, muddy gardens into grey scenes set in grey council estates and grey police stations. Everything so overcast with a grim gloom that, whilst trying to match the sombre tone of the character;s actions, it instead had the converse effect of pulling us out of the drama because it’s trying so hard to look ‘worthy’.
Bettany aside, however, the actors acquit themselves well. Brian Cox walks away with the whole film with his turn as the Fairburn father, no longer able to exercise his own brand of the law, and Stepham Graham throws everything he has into a thanklessly bland part.
Like I say, if this is your first foray into this specific niche of cinematic thriller, your non-familiarity with the plot beats at play will make the film a much more effective and mostly well-preformed thriller. But otherwise, Blood is a by-the-numbers affair, a story that’s been told before and better, and that would feel uninspired as an ITV drama, never mind a big screen release.
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