A special kind of movie.
It takes a special kind of movie to insult an audience's collective intelligence so casually and waste its time so unapologetically, that the end credits seem like the greatest gift mankind has ever known.
Blood Work isn't just that kind of movie -- it's the template.
The new film starring Clint Eastwood is perhaps the most cliche-ridden and ridiculous thrill-less thriller and unmysterious mystery you're likely to ever have the misfortune to sit through.
And that's even if you should live to see Eastwood's 72 years on this earth.
Eastwood plays, Terry McCaleb, a veteran (duh) FBI profiler hot on the heels of a serial killer who appears to have a personal attachment to the agent.
When McCaleb spots the killer -- or rather the killer's bloody sneakers -- in the crowd outside of a crime scene, he sets off in pursuit.
On foot. And alone.
Something the two or three dozen other younger officers at the scene don't seem to find odd enough to make them join the pursuit.
During the chase McCaleb's heart gives out, but before he blacks out he manages to get off a couple of shots, one that wounds the killer.
Fast forward, and McCaleb is now furnished with a new ticker, retired from the force, and living on a boat at the marina, when the sister of the woman whose heart he received asks his help in finding her sister's killer. Of course, that murder has something to do with another unsolved seeming random killing, as well as, the original case McCaleb was working when his heart gave out.
And of course there's a romance between McCaleb and the woman he's helping.
Am I giving away too much?
Actually it's hard to know because nothing, absolutely nothing in the plodding, actionless, and drab Blood Work comes as a surprise.
In fact, if you don't know who the killer is the second you see this actor on screen then you should be hooked up to a machine and your vital organs should be harvested.
And the lack of suspense onscreen isn't helped by the fact there is little or no music to even fool you into thinking something may have happened.
Eastwood is terrible in this cheap-looking film, attempting to play frail but heroic, yet coming across as drunk or something.
But even he fares better than the usually classy Anjelica Huston, who is absolutely horrendous in the part of McCabe's heart surgeon, and Jeff Daniels, who seems to have lowered himself further than his Dumb and Dumber role.
Forget the heart transplant, Blood Work is ready for embalming.
(More on Blood Work)
(This film is rated AA)
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