Cold Comes The Night

You're not reading this review because you loved Alice Eve's work in SATC 2, She's Out Of My League and the last Star Trek, are you? Maybe you caught Tze Chun's Children of Invention and are curious as to what he'd do next. Maybe. The real reason you're here is because of Breaking Bad's leading man Bryan Cranston and sorry to disappoint but his Russian accent here is laughable.

Hiding his ailing sight, Cranston's Russian hitman is sent on an errand to pick up two hundred thousand and bring it back. Spending the night at a seedy motel to give his driver a rest, the shooting of a prostitute in the room upstairs scares up the local police and the bag of money is snatched by bent cop Marshall-Green. Marshall-Green has an on/off relationship with the motel owner, Alice Eve, a single mother under pressure from social services to find a suitable location to raise her daughter. That will have to wait, though, as the mean Cranston holds Eve hostage and forces her to traipse the icy cold Canadian border town in search of the bag of money.

Cranston's accent sounds like it comes from an 80's movie. Put money in bag. You get money or I shoot girl. Put money in bag. I'm sure Russians get annoyed with how their accents are depicted on screen just as us Irish are with the begorrahs and the bejaysuses. The thing is, Cranston's Topo doesn't have to be Russian. If he played him as American, you wouldn't feel like laughing every time he opens his mouth. Speaking of which, it's hard to take anything Alice Eve says here seriously - it's difficult to believe her as a single mother and owner of a sleazy motel. The pair sleepwalk their way through this so kudos to Marshall-Green, who tries to fill the void with some jitteriness. He overcompensates but at least there's a bit of life to him.

Director Tze Chun does resist the temptation to embracing cliché entirely; Cranston might have a heart underneath all the smouldering threat, and Eve isn't as soft as she lets on but there is no falling into bed. But being thankful that a movie isn't as bad as it could have been is silly.

Don't go movie. Movie bad. See other movie.