Cold Blooded

Everything indicated that this would be yet another in a series of would-be gritty direct-to-video productions procured by some third-rate distribution company and featuring unknown actors under the baton of an even lesser-known director. But lo and behold, though everything mentioned so far regarding the filmmakers and distributors is true, what we have here is a tremendously polished, intimate thriller with a tried-and-true concept that has been maximally intensified. Set on a single floor of a hospital, a tense game of cat and mouse is played between an ordinary policewoman, a detained diamond thief, and his accomplices, who have come to settle accounts with him. If viewers accept the premise, they are in for a phenomenally well-constructed genre movie that offsets the lack of funding with a precisely crafted screenplay and ingeniously presented characters. These are essentially formulaic thriller characters taken to the extreme, which is particularly true of the fiercely scrupulous cop and the cunning criminal. Their superbly crafted dialogue as they size each other up at the beginning sets up an unstable relationship based on attraction, animosity and unacknowledged concurrence of opinion, but it mainly reveals that the lead actors, Ryan Robbins and the uniquely charismatic Zoie Palmer, have tremendous talent, which had previously been wasted on mediocre roles. Director and screenwriter Jason Lapeyre is slowly pushing his way out of the remote corners of cheap video production as one of the great hopes in the area of original and cleverly written genre-based films. In the euphoria of a publicist, one may be inclined to make comparisons to Tarantino, but it would be much more appropriate to draw a parallel with Eric Red, a pioneer of innovative and dramatically tense genre movies (but let’s hope that parallel doesn’t in any way pertain to Lapeyre’s career trajectory). 9/10 (12/02/2013)