Alice Eve and Bryan Cranston star in this muddled and rather dull thriller about a single mother (Eve) struggling to provide for her young daughter. After a bloody incident in one of the rooms at the motel in which she works, she is taken hostage by a near-blind Russian criminal (Cranston) who forces her to be his eyes when trying to retrieve some misplaced money he owes his boss.
With only one full length feature credit to his name, the drama Children of Invention, director Tze Chun tries his hand at a snowy noir thriller armed with a respectable cast. The result is admirable in intent but absolutely all over the place. Its attempts to evoke the likes of Fargo and The Ice Harvest, among others, only seeks to remind you just how good those films were at playing around in this sort of grissly territory and how this only pales in comparison.
It suffers from the same problem as a quite similar film from this year, Deadfall, in that it tries to be so many different films at once and consequentially succeeds at being none of them. Is it a kidnap thriller? A drama about a mother trying to take care of her daughter? A crime gangster saga? A dissection of police corruption? What kind of audience is it even aimed at? The film can never quite make up its mind and as a result it’s hard to get a handle on any of it.
A surprisingly slow pace doesn’t exactly help matters. That might have been less of an issue if the dialogue was anything more than standard or the characters better drawn. It lamentably sticks to a rather conventional and formulaic plot throughout thanks to a lackadaisical script that seems content to toe the line, taking some twists and turns that are as lazy as they are ridiculous. The disparate threads that were hitherto fighting for the spotlight ultimately come crashing together in an ending that fails to satisfy.
Chun manages to create an initial sense of icy, slow-burning dread and the cast do their best with two-dimensional characters – despite their efforts, Eve is never really believable as this struggling mother and the less said about Cranston’s bizarre and distracting Russian accent the better – but it’s never enough to allow this po-faced crime thriller to make any sort of memorable mark. It’s not terrible, despite being riddled with problems, but commits an arguably worse crime: it’s utterly forgettable.
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I’m right with you on this one. I was curious because of Cranston but don’t think the accent was a good choice. I also found some of the other characters (especially Billy) to be painfully one-dimensional and grating. You’re also right that it moves so slowly. It’s such a slow burn that it’s hard to stay engaged even when the action starts moving.