Blood ** (2012, Paul Bettany, Stephen Graham, Brian Cox, Mark Strong) – Movie Review

We’re in the north of England, at a gloomy, rundown coastal town. Paul Bettany and Stephen Graham are brother cops, sons of the legendary but now semi-senile retired police boss Brian Cox. Their buddy in the force is a tall, quiet, brooding man, played to perfection, once again, by the deservedly ubiquitous Mark Strong.

The three cops investigate the bloody murder of a young girl, a case that seems to lead them to a local religious weirdo (Ben Crompton). And, in their zeal to jail the killer, they let their rage about the killing rule over their intellect, particularly Bettany, who has a pretty 16-year-old daughter (Naomi Battrick) and beloved wife (Natasha Little) he feels he has to protect.

From then on, Bettany pretty much goes off the rails, while Graham follows his lead like a lamb to the slaughter though torn with his love for childhood sweetheart Zoe Tapper, and while Strong quietly does a bit of more careful snooping around on his own account.

Based on screen-writer Bill Gallagher’s 2006 six-part TV series called Conviction, and pared down and more focused for the big screen, this intimate, personal psychological drama is dark and brooding ­ and unsurprisingly quite a bit depressing. It now centres on the developing relationship between the two cop brothers, which is an add-on to the series, and their family.

So it’s unfortunate that, though good actors, Bettany, Graham and Cox seem both physically and vocally – and even actually – to come from different universes, so you never once think they’re members of the same cop dynasty. When Bettany first calls Cox ‘Dad’, you think it’s a jokey nickname for a while, not the supposed reality.

Then again, they’re not well cast as individuals either. Bettany always seems like an awfully nice man, so it’s hard for him to portray a violent, raging policeman, even if he can be an extremely effective screen weirdo or crazy, like in Da Vinci Code, or even a lone killer like in Gangster No 1. At any rate, no whiff of the cop, let alone violent, raging cop comes off him. He can’t persuade you he’s Cox’s son of Graham’s brother either.

But then Bill Gallagher’s script doesn’t really have a lot you want to buy. It plays like a regulation made-for-TV thriller with a stock plot about a cop who commits a murder. Nothing particularly wrong with that maybe, as long as you don’t feel you need to believe in it, or its pretentious Greek tragedy undertones or its over-emphasised ‘theme’ of a person who gets away with a crime being the most haunted by it.

However, director Nick Murphy (Occupation, The Awakening) turns in a very smart-looking film, with dark, menacing, noirish visuals, and arresting compositions. He and his cinematographer George Richmond have got a good eye for an unusual, stylish shot. So that definitely gives the film big-screen clout, making it seem effortlessly cinematic. The unusual setting is a huge advantage to the film, made on Hilbre island, on the westerly tip of the Wirral peninsula between the rivers Dee and Mersey, at the suggestion of the director.

And the other huge plus here is co-star Mark Strong, so good that he should really have been given the star part. No wonder everyone’s queuing up to use Strong. It seems he can play almost anything on screen you chuck at him. He’s an old-fashioned star character actor in an era where there are an endangered species, the Basil Rathbone or George Sanders de nos jours. Imagine Strong as Sherlock Holmes!

With BFI, Lottery and BBC money, Blood’s a commendably serious movie from Britain, made with intelligence and ambition, so let’s be gentle and lenient even kind to it. It’s definitely worth a look and it’s good enough so that we can look forward to Murphy’s next film with hope. But alas it’s not a warm and friendly film that’s going to win many friends. And Bettany needs to find a better vehicle for his talents sometime very soon.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Movie Review

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