Director: Tze Chun
Talent: Alice Eve, Bryan Cranston, Logan Marshall-Green, Ursula Parker
Release Date: 20th September 2013
Bryan Cranston is a gifted actor, but terminal illness and the prospect of imminent death has forced him to accept every feature film role offered to him, no matter how dire or iniquitous, in order to provide for his family when he’s gone. With that in mind, Cold Comes the Night features the three-time Emmy winning actor playing a half-blind Russian hitman called Topo (the Spanish for mole — ha ha!) who enlists the services of single mother Chloe (Alice Eve) to retrieve a large sum of money from police custody that he was supposed to be guarding. From the outset, it bears mentioning that Cranston’s Russian accent is risible and entirely incidental to the film’s plot. It’s possible to scrape a modicum of enjoyment from proceedings if you give yourself over to the idea that this is a film about an American man pretending to be a menacing Russian hitman, but not much, and with a run-time hovering at around the 80 minute mark, it’s likely that those involved weren’t too interested in what they were doing either. It’s hard to care for a character you fundamentally mistrust, and Cranston’s uncanny, decidedly not Russian performance acts as a big stumbling block to the audience identification by which the film lives or dies. In the final instance, Cold Comes The Night doesn’t work as an ironic reappraisal of the Red Menace thriller (though that would be giving it some undue credit), and it doesn’t work as human drama (though not in spite of trying). A real stinker. Thanks a lot, Gorbachev.
