There’s an Old Testament God sense of punishment at play here, where the wages of sin is death regardless of how nice a character is.
Blood money movie river code#
Additionally, since “Blood and Money” takes place in the untamed natural habitat of Northern Maine, its tone seems to mimic nature’s harsh code of survival of the fittest. There’s a line that hints that this is so, in fact. Left to their own devices, they’re a hot mess of mistakes and flawed logic. For example, I concluded that perhaps the real reason the villains were so useless was because the first person Reed took out was the sharpest tool in their shed. These situations inspired more of a response than his character’s frustrations did, because empathy requires three dimensions while schadenfreude only needs one.Īnd yet, there are ideas-depicted and deduced-that show that some care and thought were put into this material. Berenger effectively curses the gods, screaming profanity into the void while I smirked on my side of the screen. After all, he’s trying to outwit and outrun four violent criminals, yet every time he gets his hands on a weapon, or even a leg up on the enemy, the gun is empty and the advantage is temporarily lost. When karma plays its tricks on Reed, we should be as aggravated as he is about his haplessness. His own motivations remain too vague for us to latch on to him. The film’s antihero, Jim Reed ( Tom Berenger) is more fleshed out, but he’s still rather flat. The villains are so expendable and dumb that they barely even register. More development of character, suspense and plot would have gone a long way toward making this stick to one’s crime genre-loving ribs. If only “Blood and Money” weren’t stretched so thin.