The Cold Light of Day

Everyone can remember being on a family vacation that went from bad to worse.  The Cold Light of Day is sort of like that.  Directed by Mabrouk El Mechri and starring Henry Cavill, Bruce Willis, and Sigourney Weaver, it begins as a wonderful Mediterranean vacation.  From the conversations you pick up that Willis, the father of the family, works for the government and that Cavill is very busy with his job and doesn’t really want to be there.

Sure enough, when Cavill returns from a shore excursion disaster strikes and his family is nowhere to be found.  After getting in a scuffle with some shady law enforcement officials he is reunited with his dad who informs him that he is really a CIA agent.  Apparently, the people who kidnapped the rest of their family want Willis to return a briefcase he took from them.  The situation continues to escalate with more twists and turns than a bag of wet noodles.

There’s not any good way to sugar-coat this one.  It’s pretty bad.  A lot of the finger pointing should be directed towards the director, Mabrouk El Mechri.  He hadn’t directed anything significant before this film and with this hot mess his future opportunities are sure to be bleak.  The entire premise of the film is destined for failure.  The whole “untrained civilian thrown into danger somehow manages to outrun, outgun, and outsmart highly trained military/CIA operatives” bit never yields good results.

Although Henry Cavill was thrown into an absolutely terrible role, he looked pretty bad himself.  It’s really hard to differentiate how much of it is him versus the film in general but things just didn’t go well.  He seemed to always have these goofy, confused expressions that gave him all the credibility of a cancelled soap star.  Maybe they could have brought in Keanu Reeves to give him some pointers on playing a confused person.  It wasn’t pretty.

The most frightening thing about his performance is what this could mean for next year’s Man of Steel where he has been cast as Superman.  Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan surely know what they’re doing but they must be cringing a little after watching this film.

I could ramble on about all the major issues this film had but will instead choose to spare everyone (including myself) the indignity.