The Cold Light Of Day

Have you ever seen the trailer for a movie in a theater, you think to yourself “oh, that looks good!’  Then your movie starts, and you forget all about it?  That film with all that action/adventure/romance is just gone, until one day it shows up on DVD?  That was “The Cold Light of Day” for me. I knew its star, Henry Cavill from the upcoming “Man of Steel”, and its top-shelf cast like Bruce Willis and Sigourney Weaver.  But that was the last of it, no flurry of commercials, and no banner ads on TV or radio.

“This is going to be a nerve wracking conversation”

Critically lambasted, and voted as one of the worst films of 2012, Cold Light of Day is generally predictable from the gate.  Luckily, the hasty shifts in focus and hectic pacing of the film keep a sense of surprise, but soon you realize the surprise is based upon the radical jerks in the story line, rather than some revelation or turning point.  The plot follows Will (Henry Cavill), a small business owner who joins his family aboard their father’s (Bruce Willis) sailboat off the coast of Spain.  During a short excursion, Will returns to the boat to find it miraculously devoid of his family.  The second and third acts uncover the events of what happened in his absence, and the true nature of his father’s work.

While there are hundreds of articles detailing this films shortcomings, I’m not left with a feeling of emptiness at its lack of profundity.  It’s a silly action movie.   While the plot does leave some glaring omissions in content, I didn’t really expect much more out of it.  The only thing I can readily complain about Cold Light is that the setup (which admittedly only took about fifteen to twenty minutes) was so slow, it left me reaching for my phone in search of something interesting to do.  However, once the stage is set, we’re quickly pulled from speed to speed as the cast attempts to incite anxiety, action and storyline into an otherwise weak script.

There are also all the ready ingredients to the common European chase films, such as:

• The nightclub scene
• “Terrorists” Honestly, “terrorists”?  Can we have a different enemy now, please?
• Rooftop escapes
• The conveniently placed medical student that doesn’t ask questions

There were several chase scenes as well, but I couldn’t testify they occurred in a fruit market, as would normally be expected; they did however zip around a few national monuments, so: close enough.

Instinct is his greatest weapon

As is the case with so many action films; there were more than a few suspensions of disbelief that caught my attention, and left me asking questions, like:

• What IS the tensile strength of Coaxial Cable?
• Could it hold a persons body weight?
• Does everyone in Europe know a doctor that doesn’t ask about bullet wounds?
• While cauterizing an exit wound from a gunshot does stop bleeding- it doesn’t do much about internal bleeding, does it?
• Why do people in action movies keep re-cocking firearms?  If it’s cocked and not fired, there’s still a bullet in the chamber, why doesn’t this bullet eject each subsequent time?
• How many bullets fit in that gun anyway?
• Why do henchmen have such bad aim?
• How many “terrorists” are willing to die for the cause?
• How did all these people pass customs?

Again, Cold Light Of Day is not a bad movie; its just an extremely common exercise in a very diluted genre, that doesn’t offer anything in the way of originality; and certainly doesn’t push for any memorable performances from its A-List cast. Cold Light of Day was released to US audiences on September 7^th, 2012, and was recently released to DVD, and Blu-Ray on January 29^th, 2013.