FILM REVIEW OF ''COLD BLOOD" (2019)

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.

FILM REVIEW OF ''IRON SKY: THE COMIING RACE" (2019)

You can’t enjoy some sequels unless you’ve seen the original film that inspired them.  Finnish director Timo Vuorensola’s imaginative sci-fi, fantasy farce “Iron Sky: The Coming Race” (*** OUT OF ****), the follow-up to his earlier epic “Iron Sky” (2012), illustrates this maxim.  If you’ve never heard of “Iron Sky,” don’t be surprised.  Vuorensola’s original film made its greatest inroads into the American market with its home video release.  Coining less than $123 thousand at the box office, “Iron Sky” received a limited domestic release for a two-month period in only eight theaters.  Internationally, “Iron Sky” grossed $11.5 million, surpassing but not tripling its seven million Euros production budget.  The Asylum’s ridiculous mockbuster parody “Nazis from the Center of the Earth,” which would make Jules Verne cringe in anguish, skewered it with little success.  Since the sunset of World War Two, Nazis had been fodder for European zombie sagas, such as “Dead Snow” (2009) and “Dead Snow: Red Vs Dead” (2014) as well as “Outpost” (2008), “Outpost: Black Sun” (2012), and “Outpost: Rise of the Spetsnaz” (2013).  Not only is the $17 million budgeted “Iron Sky: The Coming Race” a sequel to “Iron Sky,” but it also qualifies as a prequel, since it takes us back to the Mesozoic Era: the Age of Dinosaurs.  Indeed, just as pungent with its witticisms as its predecessor, “Iron Sky 2” picks up the “Iron Sky” narrative thread and considerably expands it in different dimensions.  Timo Vuorensola doesn’t cover the same conflicts as he did in his hilarious original film that thumbed its nose at political correctitude.  A brief recap of “Iron Sky” shows the Sarah Palin-esque U.S. President (Stephanie Paul of “Crazy Love”) going toe-to-toe against the madcap Moon Nazis and triggering the nuclear annihilation of the Earth  This Armageddon forced the human race to abandon Earth.  Ironically, these fortunate survivors wind-up relocating on the dark side of the Moon, the same place where the Nazis had established their base 70 years after World War II!  

“Iron Sky: The Coming Race” occurs 20 years after the destruction of Earth.  If you saw the original, Nazi school mistress Richter (Julia Dietze of “Iron Sky”) and captured U.S. Astronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby of “The Matrix Reloaded”) started out as enemies and then became lovers. They had a daughter, Obianaju 'Obi' Washington (Lara Rossi of “Robin Hood”), and she has grown up to serve as a jack-of-all-trades at Neomenia, the former Nazi moon base station.  Sadly, Götz Otto could not reprise his role as the second Führer, because he kicked the bucket in the original “Iron Sky.”  Nevertheless, Wolfgang Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier of “Melancholia”), who took an awful beating from Otto, returns from the dead in one of the film’s several surprises. Obi’s wizened mother Renate governs life on Neomenia where Nazis no longer rule. Meanwhile, Obi struggles to maintain the deteriorating moon base facilities against the ever-present threat of moon quakes. Watching her scramble about the grungy, industrial factory interiors with breathless abandon to tackle problems establishes Obi as a heroine who refuses to wait for problems to repair themselves. Basically, Neomenia has degenerated into a ghetto because of overpopulation and a shortage of supplies.  Were things not complicated enough, a Russian spaceship blunders in from out of nowhere, and Renate must contend with asylum seekers.  Initially, Renata had decided to obliterate the spacecraft.  Obi thwarted this atrocity by shutting down Neomenia’s weapons system.  Later, she takes a romantic interest in the handsome but goofy Russian pilot, Sasha (Vladimir Burlakov of “Lost in Siberia”), because she argues that humanity must migrate to Mars. A cannibalized space shuttle offers their only avenue of salvation. Along the way, Vuorensola gives us time off from the doomsday prospect, so Obi and Sasha can flirt with each other.  Later, Obi collides with the treacherous Kortzfleisch, and he tells her about a fantastic element at the center of the Earth that will save mankind and provide endless fuel for the space shuttle.

The lightweight humor in “Iron Sky: The Coming Race” will either get you to howl hoarsely or grin at its skewered ingenuity.  The lookalike Sarah Palin president, which was a great sight gag in “Iron Sky,” is still a hoot to behold.  She spent most of her time in “Iron Sky” on a treadmill, but here she mutates into a monster with other infamous demagogues, such as Stalin, Hitler, and Idi Amin. One cheeky scene shows all of these dastards arranged around an oblong table in a tableau that imitates Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci’s renowned late 15th-century mural painting of "The Last Supper." Tongue-in-cheek humor lurks in every frame.  Timo Vuorensola is a gifted visual storyteller with an impeccable sense of pacing and pictorial composition. Like “Iron Sky,” “Iron Sky 2” doesn’t wear out its welcome at 90 agile minutes.  The larger-than-life shenanigans are nimble, flavorful, but sometimes surprisingly violent.  Hitler straddles a T-Rex like a cowboy at a rodeo, and the beast gobbles up the body of a man in its gigantic jaws.  Happily, his demise is bloodless.  Vuorensola and company borrow from other blockbusters, including a Hans Solo type Russian pilot as well as a harrowing “Raiders of the Lost Ark” cliffhanger caper.  A gigantic molten boulder tumbles after our heroes as they struggle to control chariots drawn by rampaging Triceratops dinosaurs! Fortunately, the CGI imagery passes muster, just don’t bother to freeze-frame the images. Clearly, Vuorensola conjured up some picturesque ideas that his crowd-funded budget couldn’t accommodate. 

The warped but inspired artistry of the “Iron Sky” epics is Hollywood didn’t forge them.  The original movie’s Nazi plot isn’t the kind of comic material Hollywood would have sunk multi-millions into for a movie that “culminated in Armageddon.”  These two Finnish satires provide refreshing but audacious commentary.  Incredibly enough, while “Iron Sky: The Coming Race” was awaiting home video release, director Timo Vuorensola had already embarked on a third installment in the franchise: “Iron Sky: The Ark” with a release date set for 2020!