Rating summary

Movie		1.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.5

Blood Money Blu-ray Movie Review

Bloody Monotonous

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 27, 2012

How bad is Blood Money? It's such an incoherent disaster of a narrative that the writer/director himself, Gregory McQualter, had to supply his own plot synopsis at IMDb. The film would have been better served by scrolling the text at the beginning, because God knows you can't follow the story from the shots McQualter strung together. Characters come and go, rapidly shifting locations are identified by onscreen typing, flashbacks declare themselves with a different color scheme, but none of it fits together. Watching Blood Money is like walking into the middle of a film where you've missed all the setup and have to guess who's who—except that Blood Money provides that experience repeatedly, because it feels like it keeps restarting.

Blood Money is the feature debut of Zheng Liu, whom the film's trailer enthusiastically bills as "the next Bruce Lee". Anything is possible, and Zheng certainly demonstrates impressive martial arts skills, but he'll have to find better material and a different director to showcase his talents. Bruce Lee made some cheesy films with improbable plots, but at least you always knew who was the good guy, who was the villain and what each of them was trying to accomplish. Blood Money dispenses with such fussbudget trivia. Its idea of "plot" is to fill the screen with drugs, cash, bullets and tough guys glowering. Throw in as much nudity and profanity as possible, punctuate the whole thing with fight scenes, explosions and an occasional wannabe iconic line like answering a police inquiry about how many dead with a single word ("Everybody"), and there's your story. Are you not entertained? (I wasn't.)

Although this may seem an odd thing to do, I'm going to reproduce McQualter's synopsis of Blood Money in its entirety. For one thing, it's better than anything I could create after a single viewing of the film (and you couldn't pay me to watch it again). But more importantly, did you ever imagine that a writer/director could summarize his own film and get it wrong? Pay attention to the portions I've underlined:

Zheng Zhou is the most feared warrior from the Shaolin Dynasty in China. His fighting and weapons skills are legendary. But when his parents are killed and sister kidnapped, he turns to a life of drugs and crime that will almost kill him. With the help of Hong Kong's notorious Dragon Triad syndicate, Colombia's biggest drugs cartel hatches an elaborate plan to traffic two tonnes [sic] of crack cocaine through the Port of Miami in America and ultimately into Australia and China. But when the partnership turns sour after the Cartel holds a Triad family member hostage, the Triads recruit Zhou to rescue the girl and kill the Colombians. What ensues is a bloodied [sic] street war across three countries. Zhou turns international Hitman with an arsenal of hi-tech surveillance devices, explosives, high powered weaponry and an array of fighting skills dating back fifteen hundred years. But just as Zhou rescues the hostage and takes control of the entire drugs shipment, the Triads and Colombians re-ignite their partnership with a view to having him killed. As the hunter becomes the hunted, Zhou finds he has no-where to run and no-where to hide. That is until fate steps in and a Shaolin Monk from his past not only saves his life, but changes his world forever. Written by Gregory McQualter.

So that's what it was about? You could have fooled me. The actual film opens and closes with the cryptic (and unattributed) quotation: "Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a fight"—which applies to just about everyone, including Zheng's hitman character, Zhou. You know Zhou's a hitman, because you see him carrying out hits, but as far as being a feared and famous Shaolin warrior, well not so much. You know Zhou trained with an order, because in jagged flashbacks, you see him ejected by his Yoda-like master played by Gordon Liu (Kill Bill). But how he got there after the family tragedy (also seen in jagged flashbacks) that killed his parents for unstated reasons, and what happened after the master threw him out, remains unclear. To all appearances, Zhou works for a Hong Kong crime family, the Hos, who are looking to expand into Australia. They don't "recruit" him to rescue a kidnap victim; he's working for them from the outset.

McQualter's synopsis indicates a joint venture between the Hong Kong Triads and the Colombians, but if that's what he intended to show, he failed. For the first half hour of Blood Money, different batches of criminals come and go, and many of them are mowed down, some by Zhou, some by the Colombians, some by the Hos. It's impossible to tell who's on whose side, because McQualter never takes the time to introduce anyone or explain what they do. It's not even clear for a while that the head Colombian is Esteban Cabrera (former American Gladiators star Alex Castro), because McQualter's command of visual storytelling is so weak that he doesn't know how to place key characters within a frame to indicate priority. (There's a Chinese-Colombian sitdown where you can't make out who's with which side and what the outcome is, other than a few dead bodies.) Since McQualter knows who's who, you should too. Doesn't everyone?

Eventually, the Hos and the Colombians do make common cause, but it's for the sole purpose of eliminating Zhou. Why do the Hos suddenly want Zhou dead? Well, he was told to rescue the hostage the Colombians are holding as leverage against the Hos, but before he could rescue her, Esteban shot (but didn't kill) her. Naturally the Hos blame Zhou, even though he's actually rescued the girl and brought her to his former master, who has miraculously saved her life. She turns out to be Zhou's former sister, whom he thought was dead, but suspected she might not be, because . . . actually, I don't know why. Tangential connections and unexplained motivations are what pass for plotting in Blood Money.

As Quentin Tarantino has demonstrated in Kill Bill, and indeed throughout his career, film plots can be wildly improbable and deliriously over the top, as long as they maintain internal consistency. Blood Money doesn't fulfill this basic requirement, because McQualter can't be bothered to lay out a plot line and pursue it to the end. He keeps tossing out new ones, which he also fails to lay out and pursue. The film's action scenes are neither so special nor so numerous as to distract from its essential emptiness. It's dull to watch and painful to review.

Also worth noting: The rapper Pitbull is featured prominently as a co-star of Blood Money, but don't be fooled. His appearance in the film is no more than a cameo.

Blood Money Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Another Red One production, another smooth and grainless Blu-ray. Because Blood Money is being released directly to video, the image on ARC Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has been framed at 1.78:1, instead of a theatrical ratio of 1.85:1. The difference is negligible. Photographed by Australian DP Dan Macarthur, the film has been reproduced on Blu-ray in what one can presume to be a faithful presentation, given the direct digital path from initial capture through post-production to authoring. The imagery is reasonably detailed and highly stylized, with intense cyan washes in some sequences, bright orange flames in others, deep shadow in still others. Despite Zheng Liu's obvious ability to perform elaborate feats of martial arts without stunt doubles, many sequences have been tricked out with CGI elaboration, and it isn't hard to spot. Very light banding appears occasionally, but most viewers probably won't notice. Overall, the Blu-ray is more than acceptable in the video department. If image were the sole criterion, I would recommend it.

Blood Money Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Blood Money's DTS-HD MA 5.1 track is nothing special. It's loud and delivers the requisite gunfire, kickes and punches, but there's nothing especially atmospheric or immersive about the mix. The various accents in the dialogue are sometimes impenetrable, but that isn't the fault of the mix or the sound mastering, and the subtitles are always available. There's a single rap number by Pitbull, which pulses with adequate bass, but most of the soundtrack is generic underscoring credited to Universal and EMI Australia, and it sounds just as generic as the description suggests.

Blood Money Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Other than a theatrical trailer (HD, 1080p; 1.78:1; 2:31), the Blu-ray contains no extras. At startup the disc plays trailers for Assassin's Bullet , Age of the Dragons and Brawler.

Blood Money Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I suppose it's possible that Zheng Liu might become the next Bruce Lee, but if that ever happens, I'll be surprised if Blood Money features prominently on his resumé. McQualter, however, shows real promise for becoming the martial arts version of Ed Wood. That may not be a distinction he wanted, but then again even Ed Wood never intended to become Ed Wood. Avoid at all costs.