Hit man becomes prey in a B-movie starring the redoubtable Jean Reno.
A cat-and-mouse game set mostly in wintry mountains, Cold Blood works best when it is silent. Not a word is uttered during the movie’s opening ten minutes, and long stretches later focus on action, not dialogue. But when director Frédéric Petitjean’s screenplay starts explaining itself, Cold Blood devolves into yet another noble-hit-man-seeks-redemption tale.
The hit man in question is the immensely appealing Jean Reno, whose fierce eyes and craggy face made an impression across the world in Leon, The Professional and The Femme Nikita. Recently Reno has been showing up in comedies or cameos, but here he’s banking on the menace he’s built up over the years.
As “Henry,” Reno’s seen executing a hit on a mysterious businessman early in the film, using some sort of “ice bullet” to escape detection. He makes his way to a remote cabin on a frozen lake in Washington’s Rocky Mountains, near the Canadian border.
That’s where he discovers the badly injured “Melody” (Sarah Lind), a snowmobiler who crashed nearby. As Henry nurses her back to health, the script backtracks to the mystery surrounding her father.
Petitjean also introduces cops Kappa (Joe Anderson) and Davies (Ihor Ciszkewycz), improbable buddies on the Spokane police force. A refugee from a broken relationship in New York, Kappa is a gruff workaholic in a Mustang, and Anderson plays him with a scruffy beard and nearly impenetrable tough-guy drawl. Davies and a lawyer named Brigleur (François Guetary) exist primarily to drop exposition, which is simultaneously tough to follow and irrelevant to the main story.
According to press notes, it was Reno’s idea to make Cold Blood in English, not French, opening a wider market for this French–Ukrainian coproduction. Evidently it was Petitjean’s idea to work from a Luc Besson template. The buddy cops, the lone assassin, the wordless action all evoke Besson’s Transporter series, and Besson’s frequent collaborator Thierry Arbogast provides the movie’s expert cinematography.
Petitjean, whose previous work includes scripts for film and television, forgot to include a significant villain here. That makes it hard for viewers to get worked up over what might happen to Henry and Melody. The script hints that situations will go south, and there’s no lack of suspects and red herrings. But genre fans will be able to predict each twist well ahead of time.
If Cold Blood feels like something you’ve seen before, it takes place in an alternate universe where “New York City” and “Spokane” are filled with Europeans. Some will find the movie’s eccentricities charming. They’re certainly not deal breakers. What’s more important is the sense of gravity and purpose everyone involved brings to the project.
Whether hero or villain, Reno remains a stalwart screen presence. Sarah Lind is a capable, even strong, foil. And Samantha Bond shows up in a small role as a patient in an asylum. She performs admirably in a brief but surprisingly astute scene that hints at the movie this might have been.
