Blood Money Blu-ray Review
Bloody Monotonous
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, August 27, 2012
How bad is
Blood Money? It's such an incoherent disaster of a narrative that the writer/director
himself, Gregory McQualter, had to supply his own plot synopsis at IMDb. The film would have
been better served by scrolling the text at the beginning, because God knows you can't follow the
story from the shots McQualter strung together. Characters come and go, rapidly shifting
locations are identified by onscreen typing, flashbacks declare themselves with a different color
scheme, but none of it fits together. Watching
Blood Money is like walking into the middle of a
film where you've missed all the setup and have to guess who's who—except that
Blood Money
provides that experience repeatedly, because it feels like it keeps restarting.
Blood Money is the feature debut of Zheng Liu, whom the film's trailer enthusiastically bills as
"the next Bruce Lee". Anything is possible, and Zheng certainly demonstrates impressive martial
arts skills, but he'll have to find better material and a different director to showcase his talents.
Bruce Lee made some cheesy films with improbable plots, but at least you always knew who was
the good guy, who was the villain and what each of them was trying to accomplish.
Blood Money
dispenses with such fussbudget trivia. Its idea of "plot" is to fill the screen with drugs, cash,
bullets and tough guys glowering. Throw in as much nudity and profanity as possible, punctuate
the whole thing with fight scenes, explosions and an occasional wannabe iconic line like
answering a police inquiry about how many dead with a single word ("Everybody"), and there's
your story. Are you not entertained? (I wasn't.)
Although this may seem an odd thing to do, I'm going to reproduce McQualter's synopsis of
Blood Money in its entirety. For one thing, it's better than anything I could create after a single
viewing of the film (and you couldn't
pay me to watch it again). But more importantly, did you
ever imagine that a writer/director could summarize his own film and
get it wrong? Pay attention
to the portions I've underlined:
Zheng Zhou is the most feared warrior from the
Shaolin Dynasty in China. His fighting and
weapons skills are legendary. But when his parents are killed and sister kidnapped, he turns to a life
of drugs and crime that will almost kill him. With the help of Hong Kong's notorious Dragon Triad
syndicate, Colombia's biggest drugs cartel hatches an elaborate plan to traffic two tonnes [sic] of
crack cocaine through the Port of Miami in America and ultimately into Australia and China. But
when the partnership turns sour after the Cartel holds a Triad family member hostage, the Triads
recruit Zhou to rescue the girl and kill the Colombians. What ensues is a bloodied [sic] street war
across three countries. Zhou turns international Hitman with an arsenal of hi-tech surveillance
devices, explosives, high powered weaponry and an array of fighting skills dating back fifteen
hundred years. But just as Zhou rescues the hostage and takes control of the entire drugs shipment,
the Triads and Colombians re-ignite their partnership with a view to having him killed. As the
hunter becomes the hunted, Zhou finds he has no-where to run and no-where to hide. That is until
fate steps in and a Shaolin Monk from his past not only saves his life, but changes his world forever.
Written by Gregory McQualter.
So
that's what it was about? You could have fooled me. The actual film opens and closes with
the cryptic (and unattributed) quotation: "Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins,
will not be given up without a fight"—which applies to just about everyone, including Zheng's
hitman character, Zhou. You know Zhou's a hitman, because you see him carrying out hits, but
as far as being a feared and famous Shaolin warrior, well not so much. You know Zhou trained
with an order, because in jagged flashbacks, you see him ejected by his Yoda-like master played
by Gordon Liu (
Kill Bill). But how he got there after the family tragedy (also seen in jagged
flashbacks) that killed his parents for unstated reasons, and what happened after the master threw
him out, remains unclear. To all appearances, Zhou works for a Hong Kong crime family, the
Hos, who are looking to expand into Australia. They don't "recruit" him to rescue a kidnap
victim; he's working for them from the outset.
McQualter's synopsis indicates a joint venture between the Hong Kong Triads and the
Colombians, but if that's what he intended to show, he failed. For the first half hour of
Blood
Money, different batches of criminals come and go, and many of them are mowed down, some by
Zhou, some by the Colombians, some by the Hos. It's impossible to tell who's on whose side,
because McQualter never takes the time to introduce anyone or explain what they do. It's not
even clear for a while that the head Colombian is Esteban Cabrera (former
American Gladiators
star Alex Castro), because McQualter's command of
visual storytelling is so weak that he doesn't
know how to place key characters within a frame to indicate priority. (There's a Chinese-Colombian sitdown where you can't make out who's with
which side and what the outcome is,
other than a few dead bodies.) Since
McQualter knows who's who, you should too. Doesn't
everyone?
Eventually, the Hos and the Colombians
do make common cause, but it's for the sole purpose of
eliminating Zhou. Why do the Hos suddenly want Zhou dead? Well, he was told to rescue the
hostage the Colombians are holding as leverage against the Hos, but before he could rescue her,
Esteban shot (but didn't kill) her. Naturally the Hos blame Zhou, even though he's actually
rescued the girl and brought her to his former master, who has miraculously saved her life. She
turns out to be Zhou's former sister, whom he thought was dead, but suspected she might not be,
because . . . actually, I don't know why. Tangential connections and unexplained motivations are
what pass for plotting in
Blood Money.
As Quentin Tarantino has demonstrated in
Kill Bill, and indeed throughout his career, film plots
can be wildly improbable and deliriously over the top, as long as they maintain internal
consistency.
Blood Money doesn't fulfill this basic requirement, because McQualter can't be
bothered to lay out a plot line and pursue it to the end. He keeps tossing out new ones, which he
also fails to lay out and pursue. The film's action scenes are neither so special nor so numerous
as to distract from its essential emptiness. It's dull to watch and painful to review.
Also worth noting: The rapper Pitbull is featured prominently as a co-star of
Blood Money, but
don't be fooled. His appearance in the film is no more than a cameo.
