Sure, Gordon Liu's Shaolin Monk is a good guy, but his effect on Zheng Liu's laconic hit man, Zhou, is dubious at best. For 'Blood Money,' the object for every character appears to be to present themselves as nasty and bloodthirsty as the next. There is a time and a place for sadism in movie villains, but such an attribute is typically tempered by the opposite qualities existing elsewhere in the film. The director takes no pleasure in his characters' villainy instead he seems intent on making them as unlikable and indistinguishable from one another as possible.
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What follows is a grim, deeply misogynistic story, replete with characters lacking any kind of redeeming qualities that meanders back and forth between hunter and hunted, while throwing in a series of unnecessary twists that, in all likelihood, were comprehensible to McQualter alone. The Triads, run by the Ho family, refuse the Colombians' demand to sell their product and a blood feud the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Capulets quarreled with the Montagues is born. At nearly 30 minutes into the picture it's still anyone's guess what 'Blood Money' is about, until half the cast winds up being killed off.Īpparently, McQualter's unsmiling film is actually about a group of Colombian drug dealers embroiled in a bitter feud with some of Hong Kong's Triads, because the Colombians want the Triads to sell their drugs for them – how lazy is that? After wiping out a group of Italians, and what was apparently an American drug dealer in Miami, the two groups seem to have only one another left to deal with. If you agree there is nothing inviting about the film's exterior, you would be wise to judge this particular book by its cover, because McQualter doesn't bother with such tiresome conventions as setting up a plot with actual characters to pass the time between the stilted and inelegant fight sequences. Bull's appearance is the equivalent of product placement that may or may not encourage impressionable youths to pick the Blu-ray up when they would otherwise pass by this dreary-looking cover box. Curiously, despite his blink-and-you'll-miss-him appearance, Pitbull receives second billing on the film's cover, nestled comfortably between Zheng and Gordon Liu ('Kill Bill' and countless other kung-fu movies dating back to the '70s). As far as creating a semi-lucid, remotely enjoyable action flick, 'Blood Money' isn't merely a misguided attempt at filmmaking it is a horrific failure akin to some of the most egregious crimes ever committed against moviedom.īilled as a martial arts film starring "the next Bruce Lee," Zheng Liu, 'Blood Money' more closely resembles the disjointed narrative of most rap videos – and seeing as how rapper Pitbull has a 30 second cameo as himself, wherein he sounds off on the virtues of dealing cocaine in Miami, it's no surprise that the film's aesthetic aspires only to ape from that particular field of entertainment. You could put a nice down payment on a 2013 Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse, or, if you're writer-director Greg McQualter, you could spend that amount of money making one of the most incoherent, tedious, and unpalatable films in recent memory. What are some of the things a person could do with two million dollars? At this moment you could buy roughly 3,013 shares of Apple stock.