Much as was the case with Eastwood's prior directorial credit Space Cowboys, I had long avoided Blood Work despite being a huge fan of that decade of Clint. I can't even explain why really, it was simply a hunch, a suspicion that somewhere along the line something would go wrong.
An FBI profiler forced to retire after suffering a heart attack in pursuit of a serial killer, Terry McCaleb is pulled back into his former life when it is revealed that the woman whose heart he received via transplant was murdered by the very same serial killer in order to keep him alive and in the game.
Okay, so maybe a large part of my fear of this film falling short of the Eastwood high water mark lay in the synopsis above, a synopsis which is worrying at best. The screen has seen its fair share of serial killer thrillers and then some, the amount of times we've seen a profiler/detective personally taunted and egged on by his quarry making the genre bloated, tired, and altogether too unoriginal. It would take something incredibly special to lift a film from the depths of mediocrity which form so dangerous a pitfall for this narrative formula. Drucilla Cornell, in her wonderful book Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity, suggests that indeed Blood Work does have this special something, citing the recurrent theme of having a woman's heart as the introduction of a deeper exploration of masculinity and femininity to the film. Any fan of Eastwood would do well to encounter this text, incidentally, its ideas fascinating and perspective-broadening. Whilst I understand Cornell's approach, and wholly appreciate and commend it, I myself am not satisfied that the exploration of this idea goes deep enough to escape the ultimate problem that is the film's routine ticking-off of the genre conventions. McCaleb disobeys authority, goes renegade, finds an unusual sidekick, discovers evidence hidden in plain sight, involves himself in a dangerous romance, and discovers that all along, what he was looking for was closer than he thought. The oft repeated assertion that McCaleb will be guided by the heart of Gloria is, whilst an interesting idea that does seem to indicate toward a question of gender roles, insufficient to overcome the plodding dullness of the film's adherence to a standard formula. I appreciate the effort, but it's not even nearly enough. There is nothing new to be found in this movie, nothing that does anything for the genre, nothing to commit it in any way to memory, nothing to make watching it worthwhile.
Though it tries something new with the tired old genre, Blood Work conforms too lazily with the standard narrative progression of the serial killer thriller to manage to be particularly noteworthy. Unoriginal, and thereby uninteresting, it is a poor offering from a director who has so much more to give than this.
An FBI profiler forced to retire after suffering a heart attack in pursuit of a serial killer, Terry McCaleb is pulled back into his former life when it is revealed that the woman whose heart he received via transplant was murdered by the very same serial killer in order to keep him alive and in the game.
Okay, so maybe a large part of my fear of this film falling short of the Eastwood high water mark lay in the synopsis above, a synopsis which is worrying at best. The screen has seen its fair share of serial killer thrillers and then some, the amount of times we've seen a profiler/detective personally taunted and egged on by his quarry making the genre bloated, tired, and altogether too unoriginal. It would take something incredibly special to lift a film from the depths of mediocrity which form so dangerous a pitfall for this narrative formula. Drucilla Cornell, in her wonderful book Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity, suggests that indeed Blood Work does have this special something, citing the recurrent theme of having a woman's heart as the introduction of a deeper exploration of masculinity and femininity to the film. Any fan of Eastwood would do well to encounter this text, incidentally, its ideas fascinating and perspective-broadening. Whilst I understand Cornell's approach, and wholly appreciate and commend it, I myself am not satisfied that the exploration of this idea goes deep enough to escape the ultimate problem that is the film's routine ticking-off of the genre conventions. McCaleb disobeys authority, goes renegade, finds an unusual sidekick, discovers evidence hidden in plain sight, involves himself in a dangerous romance, and discovers that all along, what he was looking for was closer than he thought. The oft repeated assertion that McCaleb will be guided by the heart of Gloria is, whilst an interesting idea that does seem to indicate toward a question of gender roles, insufficient to overcome the plodding dullness of the film's adherence to a standard formula. I appreciate the effort, but it's not even nearly enough. There is nothing new to be found in this movie, nothing that does anything for the genre, nothing to commit it in any way to memory, nothing to make watching it worthwhile.
Though it tries something new with the tired old genre, Blood Work conforms too lazily with the standard narrative progression of the serial killer thriller to manage to be particularly noteworthy. Unoriginal, and thereby uninteresting, it is a poor offering from a director who has so much more to give than this.