Clive Owen, Billy Crudup
“BLOOD TIES” My rating: C (Opening March 21 at the Leawood)
127 minutes | MPAA rating: R
The crime drama “Blood Ties” has a hell of a pedigree.
The cast boasts of Clive Owen, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup, Mina Kunis, Zoe Saldana, James Caan and Lili Taylor. Behind the camera is the French director Guillaume Canet, whose 2006 “Tell No One” was one of the most satisfying thrillers of recent years.
And yet the movie is a mutt.
Marion Cotillard
Okay, so maybe that’s a bit extreme. “Blood Ties” is competent. It’s just totally uninspired. There’s more oomph in five minutes of, say, “Goodfellas,” than in two hours of this effort.
The setup isn’t exactly original. Two brothers. One is a cop. The other is a crook.
Chris (Clive Owen) is finally released from prison after doing time for murder. He’s greeted at the gates by his sister (Lili Taylor) and younger brother Frank (Billy Crudup), an NYPD detective. They take Chris home for a reunion with their dying father (James Caan).
Chris claims he wants to go straight, but he has lots of baggage to deal with. His ex-wife, Monica (Marion Cotillard) is a call girl and periodic junkie. She has managed to raise their two kids, who are now young teens and virtual strangers to Chris. But she wants money, lots of it.
Clive Owen, Mina Kunis
Chris gets a job in a garage and starts a romance with the secretary/bookkeeper, Natalie (Mila Kunis). But he begins hanging with the old criminal crowd and, well, you know how that goes.
Meanwhile Frank takes up with an old flame, Vanessa (Zoe Saldana), whose husband he has sent to prison.
It doesn’t require a crystal ball to predict the trajectory of this yarn. Chris will slip ever deeper into crime. Frank will try to cut him some slack…but in doing so he risks his own career as a cop.
There are a couple of reasonably good action pieces here (the best is a robbery of an armored car) and the evocation of mid-1970s New York has been nicely realized.
But this is an empathy-free effort that fritters away the efforts of an obviously talented cast.
| Robert W. Butler
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