Alice Eve stars in this film. I like Alice Eve. Bryan Cranston also stars in this film. I like Bryan Cranston. Logan Marshall-Green makes it three for three, even if I don't like him as much as I like the other two. So I figured that I might enjoy Cold Comes The Night, despite hearing bad things about it. I became even more optimistic when I saw Osgood Perkins as one of the co-writers. That optimism quickly disappeared as the film started to play out.
Alice Eve is Chloe, a woman having a hard time of things. She's trying to keep custody of her daughter (Sophia, played by Ursula Parker), trying to run a far-from-idyllic motel, and not on best terms with her ex (a cop named Billy, played by Marshall-Green, she has had an affair with). Things go from bad to worse when someone is killed on the motel premises, and that someone was supposed to be working with a dangerous criminal named Topo (Cranston). Chloe ends up enlisted by Topo to help finish a job that has been started, but she also sees a way that she might be able to turn the situation to her advantage, especially when she realises how visually-impaired Topo is.
I've not seen anything else from director Tze Chun, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Perkins and Nick Simon, and I'm unlikely to now rush to anything else with his name on it. Cold Comes The Night is pretty awful, and it feels even worse because of how the main cast members have their talents squandered. Every character and moment feels like an inferior copy from numerous other movies. It's a VHS that has been used to record the Christmas Day TV schedule on long play for two decades, with any real detail or entertainment value now completely obscured by shadows and lots of static.
Eve tries to make things work, despite the fact that she has once again picked a dud to star in, and Marshall-Green has one or two moments that at least punctuate the tiresome awfulness of the whole thing, but Cranston overshadows both of them, and not at all for the right reasons. His accent, his physical performance, his energy in every moment just feels completely wrong, which is at odds with how well he does with better material.
I want to be angry at this, if only on behalf of the main cast members who surely thought they were signing on for something a bit better, but I can't even do that. There's nothing here to fuel my rage because, well, there's nothing here. The cinematography is unexceptional, the score is unexceptional, the editing is . . . etc, I'm sure you see what I'm getting at. I'm not even really angry at Chun. He doesn't put any stamp on the film, and I can go through my life fairly safe in the knowledge that I'll have probably forgotten his name by the time I ever, IF I ever, see another film from him.
I didn't like this very much, which I think I have made very obvious, and I'll hopefully never have to think of it again after today.
3/10
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