Film Review: The Cold Light of Day
Judging by his performance in The Cold Light of Day, Henry Cavill is going to ruin Man of Steel, providing one of the most emotionless, feigned performance ever seen from a star in an action film.
Just a few short hours after joining his family in Spain for their annual holiday, workaholic Will Shaw (Cavill) finds himself having to rethink his priorities as intelligence agents kidnap his mother and brother. His dad Martin (Bruce Willis) – managing, like his son, to evade capture – has been keeping a massive secret all his life: he works for the CIA.
Willis was a particularly strange and unbelievable choice as a retired, prickly family man, but once he reveals himself as a hardened CIA agent and begins throwing punches it’s easy to see why he was cast.
Sadly Willis barely makes more than an extended cameo, staying just long enough to set up the plot before leaving Cavill to take the role of action-hero. The uninteresting female lead Lucia (Verónica Echegui) tells Will how sometimes the absence of parents can make one love them more, but it would have been easier to love Martin if he’d stayed onscreen long enough to save the audience from Cavill’s tedious performance. Cavill makes Jason Statham look like Lawrence Olivier as he spends half his screen-time yelling and the rest half-heartedly fretting over his kidnapped family. He is a completely unbelievable character, being too frightened to pick up a gun initially then firing it like a seasoned John McClane the second.
Sigourney Weaver provided a great performance as a cold, calculating villainess, however her talent – like Willis’- was completely squandered by the absurd plot and terrible direction.
The action sequences are manifested as flat gunfights, lacklustre car-chases or poorly choreographed fight sequences concealed by blurry camera movements. These nauseating movements made these mediocre scenes even worse by making it difficult to see what was happening. There were also some very odd choices in shot movement that seemed disjointed from the rest of the sequence, the camera tracking through various objects to the subject in front of it (through bullet holes in car windscreens and garage windows) and occasionally turning in bizarre 360 degree spins. But on the flipside, there are several shots that are too slow and elongated, such as the long pan from the sea to the beach to Cavill’s face when he realises his family’s boat wasn’t where he left it. These shots pull one away from the immersion of the film, and it is an increasingly frustrating experience.
The Cold Light of Day is a convoluted, formulaic mess of a thriller, cashing in on bankable stars to pull audiences to the cinema and wasting their talent. The only thing to be glad about is the absence of the obligatory romantic subplot between the male and female lead of an action film, but even that change could not save this generic piece of work.
2/10