Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Bad Day for the Cut Blu-ray Movie Review

The troubles hit home.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 8, 2018

A pull quote used in the trailer for Bad Day for the Cut calls this film “an Irish Blue Ruin”, and there’s no question that the revenge scenarios in both films are certainly similar, spinning out of control in a way that may also remind some of the Coen Brothers’ chaotic Blood Simple, while ultimately leading to revelations about family that cast the almost insane amounts of violence that both films proffer in a new light. But Bad Day for the Cut has a unique contextual “meta” aspect that Blue Ruin, for all its visceral intensity, lacks, and that’s the whole longstanding internecine warfare that blighted Northern Ireland for generations. “The troubles”, as they have euphemistically been termed, defined so many strata of Irish culture for so long that they seemed to sum up a number of traits many associate with the Irish, including religion, class consciousness and, not so coincidentally, temper. “The troubles” are a potent subtext underlying Bad Day for the Cut’s story of vengeance, but that very story serves as a microcosm of sorts for the seemingly ceaseless cycle of terror and killing that afflicted the residents of Belfast for decades. The film purports to be about a supposedly mild mannered farmer named Donal (Nigel O’Neill) who scrapes by on the family homestead by fixing up cars while doting on his elderly and increasingly frail mother Florence (Stella McCusker). When Donal, who has been sleeping in a van he’s renovating, is awakened from a rather surreal dream (one which recurs throughout the film at a couple of points) due to his mother’s plaintive cries, he runs toward their house to see someone exiting and leaving quickly in a car. When he gets inside, he finds his mother dead from a serious blow to the head. That sets the whole revenge scenario into play, though Bad Day for the Cut has some fairly cheeky content for a supposed genre offering like this, something that gives it a rather distinctive tone of horror mixed with comedy that may in fact again remind some of the Coen Brothers.

The fact that Bad Day for the Cut actually begins with what seems like a completely unrelated vignette featuring an elderly man getting accosted by an unseen female while he’s dying of a tumor in a hospital gives one immediate clue that there’s something else going on in this film than its surface presentations may imply. That suspicion is only heightened when Florence seems to have a rather visceral reaction to seeing the obituary notice of the hospital man in the newspaper, though she couches it in that generalist complaint of many older folks, namely that everyone they know is dying. But once Florence is killed, Donal is thrust into a nightmare world where his mother’s past comes back to haunt him. In fact, his mother’s past comes back to more or less attack him, for just a few days after Florence is killed, two hooded toughs show up at Donal’s barn and attempt to stage a “suicide” for the farmer, a piece of “performance art” that goes spectacularly wrong, with one assailant dead and the other frightened out of his young mind.

That scared kid is the somewhat weirdly named Bartosz (Józef Pawlowski), a Polish immigrant who had been hired to kill Donal for reasons even Bartosz himself isn’t fully aware of. When it turns out Bartosz is doing this because his “employers” have his sister captive as part of a human trafficking scheme, Donal decides to show relative mercy to the kid, and the two set off together to avenge the death of Florence and hopefully free Bartosz’s sibling. The film kind of plays like the “flip side” to Taken, with the underlying shared plot point of a young damsel in distress being forced into prostitution, but with Donal rather spectacularly different than Liam Neeson’s Bryan Mills, in that Donal’s “particular set of skills” don’t exactly match the tasks at hand, and in fact kind of end up revealing him as something of a MacGyver-esque savant, where everyday items like a boiling pot of beans can become an instrument of terror.

The trail rather quickly leads to a woman named Frankie Pierce (Susan Lynch), who of course has connections both to the pimping of Bartosz’s sister and the death of Donal’s mother. Frankie turns out to be on her own quest of vengeance, with her (somewhat illogical) attempts for “justice” intersecting and ultimately colliding with those of Donal. Bad Day for the Cut has a number of viscerally intense scenes of violence, though it’s notable that director Chris Baugh (making his feature film debut) tends to keep some of the most horrifying violence out of frame. This in fact only adds some kind of delicious if awfully black humor to a couple of scenes, including one vignette where Frankie goes completely feral with an iron when one of her henchmen screws up.

Bad Day for the Cut probably loses a little momentum in its final act, even as the body count accrues, but there’s a palpable (and quite Irish) mood permeating this film, with a kind of trenchant observational style that makes it clear cycles of violence can’t just “end”, at least not in a neat “happily ever after” way. Performances are top notch throughout the film, with O’Neill and Lynch nicely matched in a calamitous climax where their power struggle careens wildly toward tragedy.

Bad Day for the Cut Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Bad Day for the Cut is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. A lot of this film is bathed in shadow, including many of the interior scenes in Donal's farmhouse in the early going, but then later when Donal and Bartosz take Donal's van on their cross country trek to figure out what's going on. As such, quite a bit of the film tends to have tamped down fine detail levels, as can be seen in several of the screenshots accompanying this review. There are a couple of isolated scenes that are quite heavily graded, including an early showdown in a club where things are bathed in red, and then in the climactic showdown between Donal and Frankie, where blue tones predominate. Again, fine detail can tend to falter just a bit in these moments. On the whole, though, there's appealing sharpness and clarity in the better lit moments, and a lot of the outdoor material pops quite nicely, despite the fact that gray and rainy skies are a frequent weather motif. Several recent Well Go USA releases I've reviewed have at least flirted with banding at times, but I'm happy to report I didn't notice any similar anomalies in this presentation.

Bad Day for the Cut Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Bad Day for the Cut features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that provides good immersion in the many outdoor scenes, and with regard to some of the tunes Donal puts on the player in his van. There are some good (and frankly kind of goofy) sound effects accompanying some of the killings in the film which also help to elevate the sound design. Dialogue is presented cleanly, though the thick brogues may require the optional subtitles for some listeners.

Bad Day for the Cut Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2:03)

Note: As tends to be the case with Well Go USA releases, the disc has been authored to move on automatically to trailers for other Well Go USA releases after the trailer for Bad Day for the Cut plays. The trailers for other releases also play at disc boot up.

Bad Day for the Cut Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Bad Day for the Cut manages to sustain a rather unique tone, one that is precariously poised between humor and extreme violence, for about two thirds of its running time. It probably tries a bit too hard in its endgame to become ultimately tragic, though that said, its none too subtle point about cycles of violence in Ireland are personalized in an extremely effective way. Technical merits are generally strong, and Bad Day for the Cut comes Recommended.