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Written In Blood
Peter Coyote and Maureen Flannigan |
By John J. Puccio
(September 10, 2005)
Say, what? You've never heard of "Written in Blood"? It played at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, and reports indicate it grossed over $7.53 at the popcorn stand.
Buena Vista Home Entertainment, always quick to see the potential in a product (the film, not the popcorn), immediately stuck it in their vaults, where their scientifically calculated market research dictated that the perfect release venue and time would be DVD in 2005 (the coin came up heads).
Clearly, the film is a low-budget affair largely overlooked by everyone, but is it worth a viewer's time? Well, let's say it's understandable why BV and Dimension Films would not chance releasing it to motion-picture theaters. It plays like a typical B-grade, made-for-television crime thriller; yet it has at least one name star and a fairly nifty premise. Which may be worth something if you're at the video store and looking for a second movie to fill out your double bill.
The plot centers on a murder mystery in which a police detective, John Traveller (Peter Coyote), admits to killing his wife and her lover when he comes home one night and finds them in bed together. But after he's convicted and put in jail, a series of murders occur that appear in several ways related to the incarcerated Traveller, the victims all being people Traveller knew or arrested at one time or another. Now, here's the nifty part: the detective's old partner, Matt Ransom (Michael T. Weiss), investigates the new crimes, and with John's help from jail he discovers that the killer is leaving a trail of calling cards behind, a trail of clues related to the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
 Seldom rising above the ordinary...not even its clever Sherlock Holmes premise can save it from mediocrity.
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Yet, why would a murderer do such a thing? And can it be a coincidence that John Traveller is a huge Sherlock Holmes fan? Along the way, Ransom tries to comfort Traveller's daughter, Jude (Maureen Flannigan), who wants to become friendlier than Ransom is comfortable with; Ransom fights with several fellow officers, including the father (Steve Rankin) of the man Traveller shot in bed with his wife; and Ransom battles with his wife (Nancy Valen), who leaves him, arguing that he never pays any attention to her anymore.
The upshot of these peripheral stories is that the movie soon becomes bogged down in soap-opera melodrama, letting its nifty premise to hang in the wind. In other words, instead of a tense whodunnit, we get a kind of who cares. Everybody in the story has a personal dilemma--divorces, deaths, aborted romances, jealousies, hostilities, you name it--and the murder plot gets so diluted, it's almost a secondary concern by the time the movie's over.
Peter Coyote is always good, but he seems forever doomed to spend his career in minor-league movies that nobody ever gets to see. He's probably more well known for his voice (which sounds a lot like Henry Fonda's), narrating various documentary programs for cable TV. Michael T. Weiss is also good, although he doesn't have as much to do in the film as we might like. Interestingly, Weiss is also probably best known for his voice, as the video Tarzan, for instance, and Lord Kadian in the game "Lords of Everquest." In appearance Weiss looks like a combination of Mickey Rourke and Michael Madsen, so he's got the rugged image down pat; but he's also got a serious haircut problem, a combination of Shemp Howard from the Three Stooges and Professor Snape from "Harry Potter."
Since "Written in Blood" is a stereotypical crime drama, the script overlooks no cliché. Therefore, expect an exasperated superior officer (Gwen McGee) to ask Ransom, a classic hothead of a cop, to turn in his gun and badge at one point. Also, expect the director, John Terlasky ("The Pandora Project," "Guardian," "Chain of Command," "Malevolent"), to keep his camera moving in dizzying circles most of the time in what is apparently a frantic attempt at audience involvement by substituting motion for substance.
Nothing helps. There is little sparkle in the film, few surprises, and no chemistry among any of the actors. What tension exists resides only in the mind of the director because he certainly doesn't communicate it to the screen. The movie telegraphs its ending a mile in advance, and suspense is virtually nil. If it weren't for the sometimes noir atmosphere, the acting of Coyote and Weiss, and the Sherlock Holmes angle, the whole movie might have been a waste.
As it stands, "Written in Blood" is just good enough not to dislike, yet not good enough to recommend for anything but last-minute, desperation viewing. Can you say "ordinary"? Or-di-nar-y.
Video:
The video quality on this disc shows how well some of the major studios are transferring their movies to disc lately. Using a relatively high bit rate to accommodate an anamorphic widescreen picture, BV engineers have managed to make what was undoubtedly an average film print look as good as possible on DVD. The image, measuring a ratio about 1.76:1 or so (about the size of a 16x9 television screen), displays very little grain, very few shimmering lines, and almost no instances of edge enhancement. Definition in brightly lit scenes is especially good, and it is only in darker shots that we notice a small degree of rough murkiness.
Audio:
Can you say "ordinary" again? The sound comes to us via Dolby Digital 5.1 technology, and its strong points are a smooth, warm midrange and a firm, deep bass. Weaker points include a modest front-channel stereo spread, voices anchored out in the center channel only, and nothing more than a pleasant ambient musical glow in the surrounds, despite ample opportunities to open up the rear speakers to various sonic effects.
Extras:
For all practical purposes, we can say there is nothing in the way of extras on the disc. However, that would be a misrepresentation of the case. I have seen discs with no extras at all, discs that didn't even have a menu. Here we have English as the only spoken language, but there are French and Spanish subtitles, with English captions for the hearing impaired; and there are sixteen scene selections. Moreover, there is a preview trailer for the movie "Mindhunters" available at start-up. The catch is that it is only available at start-up; that is, only when you've initially placed the disc in the player. You can't access the trailer through the disc's main menu, so if you want to watch it after you've played the main feature, you have to take the disc out of the machine and put it back in again. How dumb is that? Oh, well, I guess at least it's something.
Parting Shots:
With "Written in Blood" you get pretty much what you expect. It's a bargain-basement crime thriller with decent production values, decent acting, and a decent, if run-of-the-mill, plot. Seldom rising above the ordinary, however, not even its clever Sherlock Holmes premise can save it from mediocrity. Still, as I said in the beginning, it might make a good second feature for a long winter's night of video watching.
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