This is good, because it means that “Blood Money” no longer asks to be taken seriously, and can be enjoyed as a moderately eccentric action-suspense goof. Yet while Miller never becomes a more organic character than the actor’s riff, he does grow more congruous with the general tenor.Ī chronic knee injury, river rapids, an ill-starred park ranger (Ned Bellamy), claustrophobia and a disused industrial tunnel all factor into the later progress, which grows more blackly comedic after the midpoint as the action escalates. He’s gone darker before to good effect: he was startling as the villain in Lee Daniels’ nutty “The Paperboy.” Here, however, he’s closer to the wiseguy persona of his formative screen years, which simply distracts from what seems to be a straightforward thriller plot.
The actor, who himself once seemed inseparable from teen roles, has been hit-and-miss in finding appropriate vehicles in recent years. Then there’s Cusack, inexplicably lurking about in black ninja pajamas (or as Vic puts it, “looking like a Metallica roadie”), as if that’s going to somehow blend in with the sylvan settings. For a while, “Blood Money” is like watching adenoidal tweens re-enact “Double Indemnity” it’s fun, but pretty silly. As written and played here, Lynn is a tantrum-prone juvenile princess not greatly assisted by two male besties who aren’t so mature either, and who apparently never glimpsed her femme fatale potential despite lifelong alliance. This sort of thing worked better when it was played by the likes of Lizbeth Scott or Gloria Grahame, who might’ve been young themselves at the time but were already palpably adults capable of embodying pulp-fiction Machiavellian deceit. As in noirs of yore, this hitherto ordinary all-American lass immediately develops blinding, mercenary dollar signs in her eyes upon glimpsing a potential major personal gain, and is soon willing to sacrifice anyone in her path. He lands in one place, they in another - on a riverbank, where Lynn happens to find them on her morning run after a night of drunken three-way arguments. Meanwhile, white-collar embezzler Miller (Cusack) is fleeing authorities via the small plane he abandons to crash in the forest as he parachutes down with four heavy duffel bags of loot.
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