The Cold Light of Day

After missing its initial Spring release date and sitting on the studio's shelf for a few months, The Cold Light of Day limps onto screens, and crashes with a resounding thud. The movie almost seems weary of itself. It wants to be a white-knuckle action thriller along the lines of the Jason Bourne movies, but it lacks confidence in itself, so it just kind of does the minimal effort. Too bad even its minimal effort is pretty awful.

The movie stars Henry Cavill, who is one of those actors Hollywood desperately wants to be big, and keeps on putting him in projects, usually with failed results. His next big role is playing Superman in 2013's Man of Steel, so he may yet have his chance. For now, he's stuck in a cardboard action hero role, which prevents him from showing the slightest bit of personality. His co-star here is Bruce Willis, who literally looks like he can't wait for the director to yell "cut", so he can collect his paycheck. The movie also features Sigourney Weaver as the film's villain - a relentless killing machine who marches through each scene, firing off bullets, all the while possessing all the personality of a can opener. None of these actors are allowed to show any sign of screen presence, and mainly seem to be walking blindly from one end of the plot to the other.

The plot kicks off with a young man named Will (Cavill) joining his family on a vacation in Spain. Will has a lot on his mind. He's not crazy about having to spend time with his father (Willis), whom he has never gotten along with. He also has just received word that his business back home is going bankrupt. After a forced plot contrivance involving an accident on a boat his family is sailing on forces Will to leave his family for a short while, he comes back, only to find the boat ransacked, and his family missing. Will immediately runs to the police, only to learn that all is not well, and the police are crooked. Fortunately, his dad shows up to explain a few things - He's been a CIA operative all this time, and some men have taken their family hostage. Unless Will can find a briefcase that contains something the kidnappers want, his family will be killed.

Naturally, just about everyone Will runs into seems to want him dead. This includes his dad's partner in the CIA (Weaver), who tirelessly chases after Will, and despite shooting many people dead in public, somehow never draws attention to herself. The movie becomes an endless chase that we don't have the slightest investment in, because these characters are some of the most underwritten people to hit the screen this year. The movie does give Will a sexy young female as his sidekick while he's on the run (Veronica Echegui). This leads us to expect maybe some romantic tension. Alas, it's not to be, as it's quickly revealed that they are half-siblings. Instead of building on this revelation, the movie merely tosses it aside, and continues to have them run around mindlessly.

The Cold Light of Day is lazy to the extreme. Everything is just so ordinary and dull, you have a hard time believing that anyone's heart was in it. Even the screenwriters, Scott Wiper and John Petro, seem bored, as they fill their screenplay with as much exposition dialogue as possible, just to give their characters something to talk about. Its true laziness, however, is saved for the ending, which manages to give some kind of new meaning to the word anticlimax. Anyone hoping for the movie to close with a standoff will be disappointed. The way everything is wrapped up is so clumsy and uninspired, you have to wonder what the filmmakers were thinking. The ending serves as a final slap in the face of anyone unwise enough to pay theater price to watch this.

This is another painfully mediocre movie that just did not need to be made. It possesses no imagination, no wit, and no sign that the filmmakers had any other intention other than to rob audiences of their money. It should leave theaters quickly, and be on DVD by the end of the year. Come to think of it, DVD is probably where this film should have headed in the first place, bypassing the theaters completely.

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