Blood and Money

Me encantó la película. Mucha acción y excelente actuación de Tom Berenger. Espectacular el paisaje.

Tom Berrenger great. Solid movie.

The real problem with this slow-paced thriller is that the main character is not precisely likeable. As we see early in the film, he defies all sense of prudence when he decides to steal illicit money from a gang of robbers, even to the point of letting an innocent man die for it.

The scenery of the movie at the time that it takes place (November) are in such disagreement that it takes away from the movie for me. It's obvious from the snow depths and plowed banks that this was filmed at the end of winter, probably March. In some scenes, the main character is standing/slipping on crusted snow. This doesn't occur until late in the winter when warmer daytime temps or rain combine with below freezing nights. This was a huge distraction for me and makes the whole story that much more unbelievable.

The lead character did so many goofy things I wondered if this was a black comedy. 1 shooting into the woods without a clear target misses a deer... shoots a woman. Leaves her. 2 goes back to the scene of the crime to pick up a cigarette he'd left, and a bag of cash. 3 shuffles away in the snow from a gang of bad guys with machine guns escaping with their money for unknown reasons and...goes for a nap? 4 kept picking up empty guns and shouting 'goddamit' then has another nap while on the run 5 hit a guy over the head with a machine gun three times and the third time slips and falls into the icy river to be hypothermic. 6 hides out in a shed and stares out the window to be spotted. 7 waddles over to his burning campervan shouting goddamit, to get himself found again...and then shot. Somehow eluding machine gun fire by waddling away like a penguin. 8 apparently being shot in the chest was no more than a scratch. Coz he didn't bleed there was no entrance wound and didn't seem bothered. 9 found a car, found the keys, could have escaped. Stopped. Threw the keys away and shuffled back to get himself killed. 10 shouted Hey at the final bad guy he was hiding from. With nowhere to go, and was found awkwardly hiding to the point even the bad guy laughed. Everyone dies. The end. Nonsense.

Much closer to rubbish than good. Story line could have held up but for very poor way that the director put it together. Totally non credible ex USM Corp veteran with no weapons skills, no survival skills, no use of terrain despite suspossedly hunting in the area regularly, and movement betraying truth of zero military training . And childlike script. Put together by intellectually challenged team.

Tom Berenger was great - except for one thing. For an "ex-Marine", the lack of situational awareness was appalling. In the midst of a manhunt, he walked into an abandoned shed in the middle of the woods without looking in the window first, walked right down the middle of trails in a forest fall of bad guys with guns, and fell asleep whenever it was possible... I mean, anyone in that situation for real would be checking every angle, making sure the bad guys were in range, and moving off the trail to take a nap. He also out-ran the bad guys chasing him simply by... walking away from them in a shuffling motion. Honestly, this had me yelling at the screen. But the bit that was just constantly stupid was... whenever a gunshot went off, it had no effect on a bad guy nearby. Someone walks away from a car, walks a few hundred meters, hears a gunshot in the forest, and doesn't come rushing back to check on things? This also had me shaking my head. Before the credits rolled, I made a guess - I guessed that this was one of those films in which the writer was the director. Bingo. And then, as the credits rolled, I saw that he was also the DOP. So he had no one thinking about "other stuff" - no one saying to him "hey, maybe you should have a reaction shot of that guy in the forest when he hears the gunshot". A promising director like this needs to surround himself with some older dogs.

How possible an old dude that can barely walk kills the whole gang. Acting was terrible .

Blood and Money is a sloppy conflation of A Simple Plan (discovering stolen money and screwing up everything that happens afterwards) and Blood Simple (everything that can go wrong, will). Grizzled, aging, and unhealthy Jim Reed (Tom Berenger) is hunting for deer in the woods of northern Maine. He lives in an RV and is a military vet. He also has bad family business in his past. We learn that his drunk driving killed his daughter. He's a loner, taciturn and depressed. A news report tells us that five people have robbed a casino and are fleeing from the cops. When hunting, Reed sees movement in the distance, fires, and finds to his horror that he has killed a young woman who has a bag of money next to her---$1.2 million, to be exact. He flees the scene at first, unaware of the cash, until he remembers that he left a cigarette butt there. DNA evidence. When he returns to get it, he opens the bag, sees the cash, and takes off with it. The other four bad guys come after him, chasing him through the snow and shooting at him. The rest of the film is about him trying to get away. He takes a bullet to the chest, which miraculously doesn't seem to bother him that much. That's just one example of the eye-rolling implausibility that pervades this film. Another is burning some of the cash to get warm while hiding out in a cave. There are hundreds of trees right outside, but never mind that. Later, one of the bad guys gets shot in the shoulder, and he just sits there and talks like nothing happened. Not even a grimace. Maybe the freezing cold makes people impervious to pain. Not. A Simple Plan and Blood Simple were also implausible, but the characters were so well developed and the scripts were so well written that we were drawn into the stories. Not so here. Berenger's Reed is not likeable; neither do we know enough about him to care much about him. The bad guys and the other secondary characters are cardboard cutouts. It's badly edited, with quite a few scenes that drag on too long. Not to mention the loose ends, like why the young woman was alone in the woods with the bag of money. Berenger deserves credit for taking such a physically demanding role at age 70 (even though there is an obvious stunt double in some scenes). He's no septuagenarian superman, though. He does manage to kill three of the bad guys and outsmart the last one, but it's mainly through circumstantial luck rather than skill. As to the ending…….Well, it's an act of redemption. Problem is, we never really get to know Jim Reed. Berenger just isn't given much to work with. His lines are mostly restricted to four-letter epithets. The nature of the "man on the run" story will keep you watching. You just won't feel very involved.

Tom Berenger plays a retired war vet, Jim Reed who hunts deer in the winter while living in his camper. And although he takes medication, he realizes he is somewhat dying and has made some bad choices. As the movie is progressing viewers soon find out that he used to have a drinking problem who sometimes attend AA meetings. And it is there he finally meets the hubby of the diner, Debbie (Kristen Hager) he was corresponding with who appears to have problems of their own. And then in a twist of fate he accidently shoots and kills a woman in cold blood mistakenly assumed she was a deer. And then realizes later she was among the 5 who had just robbed a casino and killed a couple of people in cold blood, forcing him to clash with them as soon as he found out money was involved.