Blood Father (2016)
Despite the name, “Blood Father” (2016) is not about a mafia man who runs a racket with Red Cross blood banks. Instead, it’s used as another title instead of ‘biological father,’ as a counter-balance to ‘step-father.’
Also despite the name, “Blood Father” is not nearly as gory or bloody as I was expecting, though it does fill the ‘shoot-em-up-Tony’ genre.
In this movie, Link (Mel Gibson) is an ex-con, running his own fledgling business as a tattoo artist, at the adorably named “Missing Link Tattoo Parlor.” His daughter, Lydia (Erin Moriarity) ran away from home roughly five years prior and has just called him for help to escape the gang of drug dealers that she’d fallen in with. Her boyfriend, Jonah (Diego Luna), is whatever level of viceroy for the drug cartel kingpin, though it comes out that he’s a pretty solid failure in the eyes of the kingpin, who also happens to be his uncle.
The last time you saw Diego Luna was probably as Cassian Andor, the good-guy pilot from “Star Wars: Rogue One” (2016). Here he’s the villain, and does an outstanding job.
So: Now that Lydia has contacted her dad to help her escape the gang, the gang comes after her and Link decides to do everything he can to keep her safe from them.
Predictably, this results in a lot of shooting and a myriad of guns to do it with.
Countless gang members get shot and die, and no one particularly cares, because they’re not who the audience should be sympathizing with. It is odd, however, that the gang members keep finding Link and Lydia through their constant travel, as at no point is any form of tracking/tracker device established.
There is one silly scene where Lydia gets a ‘we know where you are’ type threatening text from “UNKNOWN.” Unless I’m very much mistaken, text messages on smartphones all list the number they come from, so that’s not accurate. That’s a very minor thing though, so it’s just a nit-pick I saw.
Speaking of Lydia: I can’t think of a character I despised more in recent memory. She’s self-centered, painfully overconfident, and thoroughly insufferable. I guess that’s to be expected, as she’s 17, and kudos to Moriarity for portraying such a horrible person. Lydia is hands-down the worst part of this movie.
I was expecting director Jean-François Richet to over-sexualize her, Michael Bay-style, but he didn’t, so good job on that too.
Link, on the other hand, is world-weary and smart on the tactics that gangs use. In much of his dialogue with Lydia, he rebuffed her patently stupid claims with realistic replies. It was the same speaking tempo as the quippy dialogue I dislike, but done in such a way that it actually felt like a parent correcting their kid, instead of two people reading different scripts.
At one point, Link solved an argument with a Nazi sympathizer by roaring at him, then later shooting him. It seemed like a solid solution to me.
A few minor critiques that I have:
With all the close-quarters gunfire, everyone should have been deaf. I realize that’s not cinematic, but it’s what would have happened
The movie had a tendency to incorrectly track the time of day, with one scene being night and the next scene being day, when it was only supposed to be minutes apart
There was no soundtrack. Something spaghetti-western or Mexican would have fit quite nicely
The ending wasn’t happy, and that’s okay. Not every movie needs to end on a high note, and this one didn’t. The biggest thing is that the movie earned its sad ending, and that made it outstanding.
I also expected a lot of Bay-esque explosions, which didn’t happen either.
The only thing that exploded were my expectations of this movie.
For the genre, it was outstanding. It’s in the same vein as “The Equalizer” (2014) or “Taken” (2008), but with less focus on killing your way through an organization to get to one person, and more on just protecting the person who’s already with you.
I probably would have enjoyed seeing this in theaters!
