Mel Gibson is trying to stay on the straight and narrow. An ex-con and recovering alcoholic, former hard case Gibson earns a crust as a tattooist in his New Mexico trailer park, all the while hoping that his missing daughter Erin Moriarty will turn up. Turn up she does and she's in trouble: she has fallen in with a Mexican gang and is on the run after shooting her gangster/lover Diego Luna. Gibson is reluctant to go to the cops as he fears he'll lose her just when he finally finds her, even when sicarios shoot up his trailer and force the duo on the run…
French director Jean-Francois Richet (best known for Mesrine and the Assault on Precinct 13 remake) is in no mood to hang around with this adaptation of Peter Craig's (son of Sally Field) pulpy novel. But a trim eighty-eight minutes feels quite short for this kind of story; perhaps Richet was all tapped out after four hours plus of Mesrine but the director whizzes through the proceedings here at breakneck speed (even a bike chase, which could have been nifty if drawn out a bit, is over before it starts). The pace may move things along but it doesn't give the daddy-daughter relationship, the beating heart of the movie, a chance to develop like it should – bar a couple of scenes where they bring each other up to speed on their respective lives, confessing to guilt and regret and loss, the central relationship feels pushed and rushed.
And the scenes they do have together aren't up to snuff because of Moriarty's unsure delivery. She's been missing for an unspecified time, is on the run having shot her lover, and yet she has the manner of a teenage girl worried dad will be angry because she's got a D in Geography. In one short scene she cries about having killed her boyfriend and seconds later enjoys a laugh with dad. The problem is if the protagonist is not feeling the immediate danger then how will the audience? In her defence it looks like a lot of her character didn't make the cut: If she's a drug addict why then is there no reaction or fall out when teetotaller Gibson throws her cocaine out?
Gibson fares a little better. Although saddled with some Lethal Weapon-type wisecracks that are odds with the situation, Gibson pulls things through Blood Father's rocky moments. Using his daughter plea for help as an opportunity for redemption, the bearded Gibson revisits his difficult past, facing down his former white supremacist biker buddies all the while refusing the temptation to drink.
Forgettable stuff.
