Thriller charting the moral collapse of a police family. Two cop brothers, smothered by the shadow of their former police chief father, must investigate a crime they themselves have committed.
It’s clunky stuff, full of dreary dialogue that Bettany, Graham and Mark Strong (cast as their straight-arrow colleague) do their best to transcend, but without much success.
These petty misdemeanours wouldn’t count so much against a better film, but with this film’s prior convictions, it’s hard not to hold it in contempt.
Blood doesn't always ring true but there is enough meat in the story and merit in the cast to make it worth watching.
A TV series might have better drawn out the crosscurrents of rage and remorse at work, and extra thought fixed the distracting rootlessness of the whole.
The film’s family-saga pretensions and bombastically overdone characterisation keep hobbling its better elements.
In Blood, we have an overcooked television police procedural, cheating on the intensity by forcing a series’ worth of developments into 88 minutes of film.
Originality may be out of Blood's jurisdiction, but it manages to plods on, dutifully walking a tired old beat.
In the end the plot lacks credibility and fails to support the tragic power and the moral weight that the writer Bill Gallagher (whose previous work has been in TV) and the director Nick Murphy (who made a decent job of the period thriller The Awakening) seek to impose on it.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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