Cold comes the night - Bryan Cranston in a film!

Rented this largely on the basis that Bryan Cranston is in it.  For those not in the know, Bryan Cranston played the main character in Breaking Bad.  Even though I only ever watched the first season of this series, it was clear that he was playing an excellently-written character - and doing it with some aplomb.  Cranston is due to appear in the latest incarnation of Godzilla (due out in the spring) and so his movie career is clearly on the up.

Cold Comes the Night eh?  Well it's not the greatest film ever committed to screen.  The plot is extremely contrived and yet somehow simple at the same time.  Cranston plays some sort of gangster - named Topo - of generic Eastern European origin who is slowly losing his sight.  When he rocks up at a sleazy motel run by Alice Eve's Chloe for the night and his partner in crime kills himself in a drunken rage with a local hooker, he decides to kidnap Chloe and her daughter, forcing them to be his eyes as he tries to get his illicit stash back from the local corrupt cops.  Contrived indeed.

I guess that the people who wrote this were hoping to make a character drama.  You can tell that they had something like that in mind as they try to develop Chloe as a character who is tough - after all, being a single mother is tough, gangster-tough even.  Then they try to give Topo a bit of soft side, as just a guy who delivers packages for a living in a world were you have to be ruthless to survive.  It doesn't really work though.  The hints that are made to Chloe's possibly dodgy background - including her uncertain relationship with corrupt cop Billy - go unused.  Topo's eventual soft side is a odds with everything we learn about his character throughout the film.  So ultimately you either have a character drama without sensible characters, or a crime thriller minus the thrills.

It's no real surprise to find out that Cold Comes the Night scores a very mediocre ~5 on imdb.  Hopefully the new Godzilla rip-off wont be as bad as all the others, and Bryan Cranston will have a film career worthy of his TV work.  Hopefully the new Star Trek franchise will become something more than just a check-list of things you might remember from the TV series, and Alice Eve's movie career wont just consist of her gratuitously removing her top.  I wish these actors well in their careers, because when they look back they'll want to have more than Cold Comes the Night on their cvs.