Cold Blood is a 2019 action film about a hit-man who lives isolated in a cabin at the edge of a lake where an injured woman arrives in front of his house.
I’m convinced there are more assassins in movies than there are in real life, the big screen home to an endless supply of hitmen/women with all kinds of troubling lives. But that’s entertainment. And if the movies have a kind of ‘famous’ assassin, it’s got to be Leon from Luc Besson‘s celebrate Leon: The Professional from way back in 1994. That starred Jean Reno in the lead, a career-defining performance that still has plenty of growing fans. With director Frédéric Petitjean‘s latest indie release, Reno returns in a familiar part, Cold Blood once again fitting the expressive actor with assassin accoutrement, the film not directly naming itself a sequel of sorts but playing well enough into the expected to kind of do so on its own.
Out in the wintery woods of Washington State, Henry (Reno) lives isolated in a small cabin, clearly trying to be away from it all. Not far away, a young woman named Melody (Sarah Lind) speeds along on her snowmobile and crashes horrifically into the trees. She manages to crawl in the snow to Henry’s feet, where we then flashback nearly a year to learn that Henry recently killed a man with some influence in some very bad circles. As Henry tends to Sandy, trying to figure out who she is, into the mix comes Kappa (Joe Anderson), a detective looking for his own isolation in the state, soon entangled in the investigation.
The opening sequence of a woman apparently on the run from something, so desperately so that she loses control and smashes into the trees is an admittedly compelling start, her coming upon Henry as she does full of curious questions if his cabin was actually where she was headed. This manages to properly set the hook as Cold Blood follows a lengthy trend of late where flashing back to what happened before the start fills in the gaps. That’s centers a lot on Kappa and his move from New York to Spokane, where his past is always in play. Anderson loves to brood, as he showed off a lot recently in Backdraft 2, and commits to it again, gleefully overdoing the angsty cop to high degrees of obvious.
Where things get better is whenever Reno is on screen, embracing the quiet callbacks of his Leon, slowly and carefully deciphering just who and why Sandy has shown up on his front step, deciding to care for her rather than let her bleed out. These moments are not quite enough to raise this to heights it could be, but at least – mostly because he’s so familiar in the part – work well enough. He lives off the land, hunting and fishing, keeping himself purposefully distant, taking the time to deal with some old haunts by paying a visit to a dementia-riddled woman (Samantha Bond).
Naturally, it all comes to a collision, and with a generic title like Cold Blood, it feels like it is brewing to a, well, bloody end, but this isn’t a Liam Neeson film and Petitjean is more interested in ambience and atmosphere, action put to the side in favor of dialogue and a plot built with big blocks. There’s enough to keep genre fans perhaps invested but lacks the heart a good mystery like this needs, not offering anything to give it any significance.