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Old
guy with a bad ticker, sounds to me like it might be a little too close to
reality in regards to the ancient Clint Eastwood. Don’t get me wrong, I still
love seeing the old guy on screen, but a guy born in 1930 really should be
careful with what roles he takes. What I am alluding to is that Clint
shouldn’t be chasing down bad guys, instead he needs to do something like Driving
Mr. Daisy. Of course he could probably still kick my ass, but then again I
think I could just out run him. The
film starts off with FBI agent Terry McCaleb (Eastwood, True
Crime) arriving on the scene of another gruesome serial murder in LA. There
LAPD detectives Arrango (Paul Rodriguez, Ali) and
Waller (Dylan Walsh, We Were Soldiers) are
investigating what happened and complaining about McCaleb because he gets all
the press and glory. Soon Terry uses his instincts to go after a person in the
crowd that he feels is probably the killer he has been tracking for years. After
a long chase (with no back-up) Terry catches up to the guy, but then goes down
with chest pains. Before collapsing, he shoots at the suspect and hits him once,
but the killer escapes. Cut to a few years later and Terry is recovering from
heart transplant surgery when a Graciella Rivers (Wanda De Jesus, Ghosts
of Mars) shows up in his life to tell him that he has her sister’s heart
in him, and that she would like him to help track down the person who killed her
sister. She uses her sister’s son (Mason Lucero, The
Sweetest Thing) as the closer in trying to get Terry to do this despite it
being against his doctor’s (Anjelica Huston, The
Royal Tenenbaums) orders. He starts by trying to get info from his old
detective pals Waller and Arrango, but they aren’t much helps, so he goes to
an old friend Jaye Winston (Tina Lifford, Pay
It Forward). She helps him, but most of the work gets done by him, with the
help of his friendly, lazy houseboat neighbor Buddy Noone (Jeff Daniels, Pleasantville).
Eventually he discovers why these people were killed, but he still struggles to
discover the identity of murderer. Clint
also does the directing for this film, and he did a good job of leaving little
clues, but not too much to give away the ending too quickly. The film was
written by Brian Helgeland (best known for LA
Confidential), who adapted it from Michael Connelly’s book
of the same title. Some others in the film are June Kyoko Lu, Igor Jijikine,
Alix Koromzay, Gerry Becker, and Clint’s wife Dina. Though
not a true thriller, Blood Work does well in keeping the suspense through most
of the film. You figure the plot out before Clint’s character, but not way in
advance. Of course there is some believability issues with the aging Eastwood
running down people in an alley (and you can tell that Clint used a body double
for some of the scenes) and having sex with a much younger woman. Interesting
story that gets eight couches on the About-Movies.com scale.
Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:47:59 AM Click Here to get back into frames.
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