French writer/director Frédéric Petitjean makes his feature film debut with “Cold Blood,” (** OUT OF ****) a somber but suspenseful, low-budget, crime thriller set in the snow-swept wilderness of rural Washington state. Veteran actor Jean Reno toplines in the familiar role of a professional hitman who prefers peace and solitude to the chaos and anarchy of the city. Nowhere near as entertaining as “Le Femme Nikita” or “Leon: The Professional,” “Cold Blood” qualifies as a cat and mouse thriller between a quarry and its prey. Imagine a slight spin on the Stephen King movie “Misery” (1990) where a woman saved a famous author after a car crash and confined him to a bed where she maintained him in excruciating captivity. “Cold Blood” depicts a somewhat similar storyline. A young girl has an accident in the middle of nowhere, and a suspicious hermit--a hitman in hiding--helps her recover at his secluded cabin. The two suspect each other of treachery, but the film plays out under different circumstances than “Misery.”
Filmed largely on location in the Ukraine, “Cold Blood” benefits immeasurably from the atmospheric, widescreen cinematography of “Fifth Element” lenser Thierry Arbogast. “Cold Blood” is serene looking, but beneath that serenity lurks evil. Reno is as cold and calculating as he was in “Le Femme Nikita” and “Leon: The Professional,” but he has been cast here as the villain rather than a hero. Sarah Lind portrays Melody, the daughter of an underworld crime czar, who plans to avenge the murder of a father whom she barely knew. Joe Anderson is a tenacious N.Y.P.D. detective who never gives up a case. Happily, Petitjean doesn’t drag out the obvious, and “Cold Blood” doesn’t wear out its welcome before the villain receives his just comeuppance. Nevertheless, despite its many contemplative strengths, this tense movie is neither a date night outing nor a supercharged shoot’em up.
“Cold Blood” opens with a lone figure careening recklessly through mountainous white terrain on a snowmobile. A sudden accident launches the rider into a head over heels trajectory into the sky as if propelled from a catapult. The rider smashes into the ground, and the impact knocks the helmet clean off, so the victim tumbling into the snow is revealed to be a young woman. When she manages to regain consciousness, Melody (Sarah Lind of “The Humanity Bureau”) finds a tree branch partially embedded in her thigh. Mustering her nerve against the horrific pain, this dark-haired twentysomething removes a fragment of the tree branch. During the crash, she skinned up her face, and she has blood caked on her forehead.
Afterward, Melody crawls on her belly down a pristine white hillside, leaving a trail of bright red blood until she passes out again near a remote cabin by a lake where a solitary figure sits ice water fishing. After Henry discovers her body inexplicably on his property, he carries Melody into his cabin and dresses her wounds as best he can, considering they are seventy miles from civilization. Moreover, reclusive as he is, Henry isn’t prepared to accommodate guests, especially injured ones who require medical treatment. Fortunately, Henry has enough medical training and the equipment to keep Melody alive. Mind you, the logistics of Petitjean’s plot calls for Melody’s injuries to be moderate but not life-threatening. She is in no position to rummage around Henry’s cabin and ends up tearing open the wounds that she inflicted on herself during the accident.
At this point, Petitjean leaves the two in the cabin and flashbacks ten months earlier to the bustling metropolis of New York City, where Henry is walking on a treadmill at a fitness club. A sleazy millionaire industrialist with organized crime ties, Kessler (Jean-Luc Olivier) joins Henry later in a steamy sauna accompanied by his two bodyguards. Somehow, after Henry excuses himself from the sauna, one of the bodyguards notices Kessler is bleeding from a wound. Later, at an entirely different place, Henry removes an inconspicuous attaché case crammed with currency from a coin locker.
At Kessler’s funeral, two plainclothes detectives, Kappa (Joe Anderson of “Amelia”) and his partner Davies (newcomer Ihor Ciszkewycz), discuss the peculiar nature of the industrialist’s demise. According to the so-called ‘criminal’s manual,’ killers are supposed to attend their victim’s funeral, but Henry knows better than to show up for the last rites. Kappa explains to Davies that the bullet which killed Kessler was made from ice, so the police cannot use ballistics to trace the gun. Mind you, the ice bullet gag is an old assassin’s trick dating as far back as “Corruption” (1933) where a man was shot and killed with an ice bullet to frame another fellow for the murder. Although the case looks like a dead end for Davies, Kappa pursues it relentlessly. Anyway, everything comes full circle twenty-one minutes later as the gal who wrecked her snowmobile arrives in Spokane to rent a bike.
Of course, whether she wants to admit it, Melody doesn’t have a clue about what she is letting herself in for when she stalks a career assassin who carefully plans everything. Indeed, as we learn later, Henry knew the odds were outlandish a pretty damsel-in-distress would show up conveniently near his front door with injuries which weren’t fatal but required immediate care. Petitjean ignores pesky reality. Naturally, Melody needed an excuse to justify her presence. Apparently, however, it never occurred to our heroine that she might have killed herself and accomplished nothing.
“Cold Blood” amounts to a thinly plotted stalemate between these two characters for most of its 91 minutes. They treat each other with extreme caution and utter few words. They behave like two predators circling each other, biding their time for the right moment to catch the other off-guard. Melody has no idea Henry is prepared for virtually any contingency. Simultaneously, Henry cannot imagine the unsatisfying surprise ending that catches everybody—heroine, villain, and audience--napping. Altogether, “Cold Blood” is a little too anemic for its own good.
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