In short: Blood Money (2017)

The new film by Lucky McKee finds three horrible people who aren’t actually friends (but whatever, one imagines the script writers to think) and who don’t seem to have a single redeeming quality between them stumbling over a whole lot of money during a camping trip, which they at once proceed to steal.

Faster than you can think “Gee, what assholes!”, they begin trying to fuck each other over in varying combinations, with little success. The criminal whose money these tools have stolen turns out to be a very tired and cranky looking John Cusack, dressed in the weird rags he’s started wearing in nearly all of his roles ever since he has come down to movies like this one, plus a bandana to make the outfit even more absurd. He then proceeds to go after the vile idiots, somehow managing to keep up with the relatively fit looking trio despite looking like Cusack looks in 2017.

What could be a nice combination of a survivalist chase thriller and Treasure of the Sierra Madre style existentialism breaks down thanks to the seeming unwillingness of everyone involved to actually apply themselves. McKee has made one to four (depending on one’s tastes) good to brilliant movies, but this one could have been directed by anybody: there’s no sense of place, no dramatic rhythm, and the photography is only excellent at making a patch of theoretically attractive semi-wilderness look as bland and nondescript as possible. The action sequences lack in focus and a sense of physicality. One hesitates to even call this “direction”, it feels more like the product of someone just showing up and going through the motions.

Which is more than can be said of Cusack’s performance here. He seems to try and beat Ben Kingsley at his game of showing up in low budget fare, cashing his cheque and doing nothing at all a guy randomly grabbed from the street couldn’t have done cheaper. It’s pretty sad to witness, really, for when he bothers, he still can be a focused, charismatic actor.


The rest of the cast is decent enough, I guess, but they can’t really do much about a script that confuses exploring the dark sides of supposedly normal people with giving us a trio of characters who are so horrible in every single interaction I’m honestly confused why I should care about anything that happens to them. This is not a story of people who show their darkest, deepest secrets when confronted with temptation but one of assholes that are assholes throughout, doing asshole things being hunted by another asshole; and not even interesting assholes at that.