You know the old saying, so bad it’s good? Well the thing about Danny Dyer‘s new film, Bloodshot is that it’s just so bad, it’s still bad. It’s a shame really, because it all starts out so promisingly and Dyer is good, he really tries for this film, but sadly neither he, nor an odd show from Keith Allen ,can save this diabolical script from itself.
When Philip (Dyer) is out running late one night, he has a chance meeting with the confused and erratic Jane (Zoe Grisedale). She doesn’t seem to know what’s going on or where she lives and she speaks French sporadically. Philip tries to help her but she’s still a little erratic and in the end he decides it’s best if he just takes her back to his place for the night. After Jane wakes up on Philip’s sofa, small glimpses of what happened to her come back, but it’s still a little hazy for her and it’s beginning to become clear that Jane is a little strange, unhinged and there’s a darker story to her than she’s letting on. We find out that Philip is a sculptor and the interesting thing is that it seems he too isn’t all that normal, but that’s all rather ambiguous. The relationship between the two is quite unusual, it almost feels cat and mousey. Jane says she’s American, but she’s clearly British and Philip just takes it on face value. As the story continues it never really deviates or explains much from this strange little story between the two all the way until the end.
The fact of the matter is, as much as you may want to like Bloodshot, mostly because of Danny Dyer, who is in a very different role than what you’re used to seeing him in, you can’t help but find the film utterly boring. The whole film is just one hour and forty minutes worth of unwavering craziness. It feels like at times Bloodshot just throws some characters together in a scene for the sake of it. Things take a real nose-dive just after the hour mark when we get to see some amazingly bad drunken-breakdown acting and you really don’t understand what’s going on anymore. Some of the characters, Philip’s co-workers especially, are laughably dense and conversations are just stupid, nobody ever has conversations like these people in this film, and it’s just so, so stupid.
The film tries to blend multiple genres into one and that’s part of the problem. There’s far too much going on and it results in a mind-boggling experience. The film will jump pointlessly from scene to scene and it results in adding zero to the film. One example of this is that Philip and Jane nearly have sex, Jane goes crazy, she leaves his house, Philip is sad, he goes looking for her and finds her, he takes her back to his house, they nearly have sex, Jane goes crazy and she leaves his house. That all happens over the span of about twenty minutes and you just wonder what have you and the film gained from it since the story didn’t evolve whatsoever.
It’s dumbfounding that someone managed to take this script to a studio and it got made. Danny Dyer once did a candid radio show in which he said he hasn’t done a film he was proud of since The Business, but he’s an actor and he has to work. It’s safe to say Dyer, who performs well, probably won’t care about this film too much and neither should we.
Rating: Bloodshot is an upsettingly bad affair and while it never bills itself as an out-and-out horror film, it’s still an insult to use that label anyway. (1/10).
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