BLOOD WORK (Clint Eastwood, 2002)

Reviewed: August 11, 2002
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Opinion In One Sentence: Enjoyable first half, bad second half.

Personal Recent Clint Eastwood Baggage: Unforgiven's one of the best films ever made, A Perfect World's wonderful, no comment on The Bridges of Madison County, Absolute Power is not good, Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil is mildly enjoyable, True Crime is mildly enjoyable, walked out of Space Cowboys.

The Story In The Most General Of Terms: Eastwood plays retired FBI man Terry McCaleb, whose heart transplant saved his life. Turns out woman who provided heart transplant was murdered, so victim's sister intrepidly begs Eastwood to apprehend her killer (citing you owe her this much! and all that obligation jazz).
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I'm a sucker for an entertaining, well-crafted, crime mystery/thriller/particularly whodunit. The past ten years have yielded a drought of such films, so when one finally does surface I quickly lap it up like a desert-walker dying of thirst who happens upon a waterfall. Too bad then that, alas, Blood Work is just a mirage.

The first half had me fooled. Clint Eastwood directs with a pleasant, old-school simplicity, not seen since, well since last weekend's Signs (though that statistic begets the novelty of M. Night and Eastwood's work; aside from them, I can't think of many other talented helmers who still film with such a sparse touch).

While Blood Work is excessively talky and never anything special and will immediately bore the faint of heart, I never much minded cause the dialogue's credible (by Brian Helgeland), the characters are noble and likable, the acting's solid and there is a constant sense of motion. Blood Work is the most straightforward of procedurals; Eastwood's character goes step-by-step, trying to solve a woman's murder. Fine. Great. Easy cause and effect: the clues of the case are (initially) interesting, thus the movie's (initially) interesting. I'll happily play along.

That is, I'll play along until the entire mystery is clearly and far too early revealed to anyone with half a fucking brain (between the halfway and three fourths mark). I won't elaborate with hows and whys. All I'll say is: I'm a "dumb" audience member, in the sense that I almost never figure these things out before the end. I purposely walk into the theater naive and innocent; I want to be taken on a ride, I don't wanna waste my time and brain power trying to prove I'm smarter than the film. But if the film is so god damn dumb and the killer's identity is so fucking stupid and obvious, it doesn't take the proverbial rocket scientist to figure out the solution. The knowledge is unavoidable. Not coincidentally, also at around the halfway/three fourths point, Eastwood's character becomes an idiot and it was painful to watch for forty minutes as this character I came to care for obliviously circles around Captain Obvious.

Or perhaps I'm being a little hard on him. After all, the character is not privy to the great lengths Eastwood the filmmaker goes to emphasize every one of the film's clues to us, the audience. Hell, if only Eastwood the actor's character could watch Eastwood the director's film while it was shooting, I bet he'd have the whole case wrapped up in no time at all.

I'll close w/a balancing act of plus/minus.

Plus: Angelica Huston's smart, tough, protective cardiologist who seems vaguely, inexplicably in love with Clint.
Minus: The obnoxious cop (played by Paul Rodriguez). This is one of the most poorly conceived characters I can ever remember seeing. All his dialogue are insults, and all his insults are mindnumbingly lame and so motherfucking incredibly annoying. Not fresh, not hip, not cool, not fun. Annoying. And pointless. I wanted to rip out his jugular every single time he appeared on screen.

Bonus minus to the horrid climatic shoot-out that is so outrageously over-the-top I was laughing out loud. This dénouement is so ridiculous and flies so fast in the face of the deliberate pacing and stylistics Eastwood established throughout the rest of the pic, it borders on parody.

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