Blood, 2012.
Directed by Nick Murphy
Starring Paul Bettany, Stephen Graham, Mark Strong and Brian Cox.
SYNOPSIS:
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.
A young girl lies murdered inside two pools: one of her own blood, the other a skate park in which her battered body is discovered. Two detectives – brothers, it would happen – peer at her corpse and instantly wince in revulsion. “I’ll catch him,” says Joe Fairburn. “I promise.” He isn’t playing around, we soon find.
Ideologically blunt cops ‘n’ robbers pics usually culminate in a vengeful execution of their antagonists, making sure ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ stays fashionable well into the 21st century. Just ask Harry Brown, or its ancestor Dirty Harry. In Brit director Nick Murphy’s Blood – as blunt as title as any – the killer’s comeuppance is instead brought forward from third act to the first, acting as a catalyst for the subsequent breakdown of minds, composures and relationships of the familial, friend and professional variety.
Paul Bettany plays Joe Fairburn, a fish out of water madly flailing his fins in an effort to enduringly appear ‘on the case’. As a young man, he followed his father Lenny (Brian Cox) into the police precinct and forgot to come up for air again. His brother Chrissie (Stephen Graham, refreshingly innocent here) is a far more suitable fit for the task of police detective, contrastingly compelled by a sincerity and compassion for both the innocent and guilty.
Joe is nothing if not wildly psychotic, and his desperate endeavour to tie up all loose ends – no matter their capacity to stain with blood – pushes him further down the rabbit hole and into seriously dark territory. Paul Bettany embraces his inner rage to the point of excruciating monotony, however. His character starts at too high a hyperventilation and only gets more animated from there, prompted into continual panicked bursts by the reappearance of a familiar visual cliché intended to engender feelings of guilt. To spend 90 minutes with this one-note grimacing is to borderline mimic its anguish, which may or may not be a commendable feat.
Murphy directs an icy blue palette: the sky, sea and surface alike are clear, crisp and cold, though one gets the faint whiff of the tried-and-tested teal-and-orange scheme – minus the orange. There are some striking landscape shots held for effect, especially at night; one such image hovers over the washed out contours of the skate park, as police colleague Robert (Mark Strong) stands tall and still in the background like a piece of furniture: a function and dearth of presence he assumes for most of the film, in fact.
For all its intermittent beauty, much of the sombreness inferred by the form is trampled on by the voluminous despair of the script and its delivery courtesy of Bettany’s cop-on-the-brink. Remove its bleak colours, its shallow familial observations and its thick layering of melancholy, and Blood begins to resemble a regional detective drama of the sort usually found on Sunday night television.
And in the grand tradition of guilt-based trajectories, there is a tragic punch line. “Why do we let people break us?” asks one character. “Love,” replies the other. If that was known all along, then why on earth did they put themselves through such unrelenting misery?
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Ed Doyle – Follow me on Twitter.
Originally published June 10, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
