Cold Comes The Night (2013)
Crime | Drama | Thriller

Tagline: Sometimes the fight of your life comes in the dead of night.

As the proprietor of a motel, Chloe (Alice Eve) is in financial trouble and has let Billy (Logan Marshall-Green), a corrupt cop, take advantage of her situation. One night, Topo (Bryan Cranston), a hardened Polish career criminal stops over at the motel while en route to deliver cash to an unknown boss. While at the motel, his car is impounded along with the cash delivery. Using Chloe's daughter as collateral, Topo forces Chloe to help him go after Billy, who has stolen his money from the car. Hoping to escape to a better life, Chloe tries to strike a deal with Topo but soon finds herself in over her head, and a series of double crosses leaves a cloud of mayhem and murder.

Storyline: A struggling motel owner and her daughter are taken hostage by a nearly blind career criminal to be his eyes as he attempts to retrieve his cash package from a crooked cop.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman on March 3, 2014 -- The Bible says that "the love of money is the root of all evil." What it doesn't say is that it's also the root of a lot of mediocre movie plots. Cold Comes the Night is the latest in a long and mostly undistinguished line of films in which an innocent person, usually someone dealing with financial problems, is caught up in the middle of a power play between several rather bad people who are maneuvering to get their hands on some large stash of cash. Director Tze Chun's (Children of Invention) film feels as if on life support from its open forward, failing to break free from tired genre convention, content to go through the motions and leave audiences feeling as if they've seen the movie before and hoping they never see it again. It's competently assembled but features a total lack of imagination as it procedurally moves from A-to-B-to-C with the predictability of the sunrise and the general disappointment moviegoers know all-too-well.

Chloe (Alice Eve) is a single mother who runs a sleazy motel with a reputation for drugs and prostitution. She's down-on-her-luck, barely making ends meet, and to make matters worse, the state has deemed her current situation unfit for daughter Sophia (Ursula Parker) and threatens their separation unless Chloe can improve their living conditions in two weeks time. When an odd but otherwise seemingly innocuous motel patron named Topo (Bryan Cranston) takes her hostage, her world is further upended. Topo demands that Chloe help him track down a large sum of cash that's gone missing. Their quest to find the money leads them to Chloe's lover, a corrupt cop named Billy (Logan Marshall-Green). Soon, they find themselves in a web of danger and double-crosses that could spell disaster for all involved.

Cold Comes the Night is best described as a "standard operating procedure" Thriller, a movie that seems to aspire to nothing more than covering well-treaded ground. There's precious little real, palpable tension released during the film as it casually maneuvers around a predictable and play-it-safe arc that fails to develop its characters beyond its core needs and never once finds a sense of urgency or purpose (beyond advancing the plot) in its story. It's absent any real deep themes, substituting emotion and human interest with stale dialogue and meaningless cliché. To its credit, there's an effort to build up its story through tension rather than cram it with needless action. The problem is that the tension is negated by that overabundance of banality. The result is a picture that drags not because it needs more violence but because it needs more focus and originality within the pieces in play.

Fortunately, a quality cast evens things up a bit and keeps the movie afloat, albeit barely. Breaking Bad fan favorite Bryan Cranston does what he can to find some depth to his character and the story, which isn't much. His efforts, ultimately, end without much success. His performance -- complete with a distracting Eastern European accent -- manages to push the character in the right direction but fails to find the nuance necessary to sell the end. The scripted arc takes a rather flat trajectory, resulting in not so much an unbelievable resolution but certainly one that could have been developed a bit better along the way. Cranston's work is proof-positive that good actors can elevate great material but that even the best will struggle to breathe more than cursory life into a mediocre part. Alice Eve, likewise, does what she can to advance the story of a character saddled with a terribly unoriginal story arc. She plays the "desperate/protective mother" role well enough, though there's a clear absence of real emotion not because her performance is in any way weak but because her surroundings never allow for much more than a straight-and-narrow push on her character's instincts.

Cold Comes the Night is a generic Thriller from top to bottom. The story lacks creativity and the direction is straightforward but the performances are fine within the screenplay's unimaginative boundaries. Even so, the solid lead cast cannot do much more than keep the movie afloat. It's a disappointing affair all around, not a terrible movie by any stretch of the imagination but definitely one of the most forgettable films of 2013. Sony's Blu-ray release of Cold Comes the Night features strong video and audio. Supplements are limited to an quartet of deleted scenes. Skip it.

[CSW] -2.4- Aside from good performances from Alice Eve and Bryan Cranston, Cold Comes the Night is pretty boring, however it felt like it didn't have to be. While the story could have easily worked, the film suffers from most from the characters not being developed, lousy dialogue and too many plot threads. If they had gotten Quintin Tarantino to write the dialogue the character development could have been almost completely filled in with the proper dialogue alone. Of course Quintin would have dropped some of the smaller plot lines to keep the tension higher. All in all I didn't care very much if any of the characters lived or died, the little girl included. As I said, it had poor dialogue and poor character development. Other than that it was an okay time waster for a boring afternoon.
[V4.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.


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