Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
1/31/07
If you've seen as many movies
and watched as much TV as I have, inevitably you're going to have some
personal favorite performers who're complete unknowns to 99.9% of the American
public. I've rented untold direct-to-video dreck to watch Nick Mancuso
ply his trade, and my eyes light up whenever I see the names Christopher
Lawford or Janet Gunn in a list of credits. Not everybody stays on
the list forever: some finally get their big break. Sam Anderson's
now a semi-regular on Lost, and I was a huge Brittany Murphy guy
back when she was starring in things like The Prophecy 2.
Which brings us to Agnes Bruckner, a 21-year old actress who's been a personal
favorite since she blew me away in a supporting role in the otherwise unexceptional
2002 thriller Murder By Numbers. She's the best thing about
the new werewolf flick Blood and Chocolate which, after getting
off to a rocky start, shows surprising spunk and brains.
The movie would chide my
use of the word “werewolf” because we're actually talking about the Loup
Garoux, a pack of shape-shifting wolves who spend most of their time in
human form hanging around Bucharest, a city we're assured they “rule from
the shadows”. The leader of this pack is Gabriel (Olivier Martinez),
who enforces a rigid code which seems to be designed in equal parts to
keep the wolves safe from humans and to keep him in the beds of the clan's
hottest women. In the name of the later goal, he takes a new wife
every seven years. Once, it was the now terminally depressed Astrid
(Katja Riemann), with whom he fathered out-of-control wolfboy Rafe (Bryan
Dick). Now, as the seven years are almost up, he's turned his attention
to Vivian (Agnes Bruckner), a young chocolate shop worker (thus, the awful
title) whose parents were killed by hunters. She in turn, has a chance
meeting with Aiden (Hugh Dancy), a graphic novel artist who's in Romania
to study the “legend” of the Loup Garoux for a book. It's love at
first sight, but that doesn't sit well with the Powers That Howl.
All this set-up (which occupies
a little over half the movie's running time) is pretty pedestrian, saved
only by the fact that Bruckner and Dancy have genuine chemistry that survives
even a laughable romantic montage that brought back memories of The
Naked Gun (luckily, Platoon isn't showing anywhere in Bucharest).
But once Gabriel decides to, uh, release the hounds on his rival, Blood
and Chocolate finally takes off. Aiden turns out to be the perfect
guy to take on the clan, both because he's internalized all his research
about their strengths and weaknesses (they really don't like silver)
and because he turns out to be a tougher customer than your average Graphic
Novelist. While much of the movie is on auto-pilot, the third act
is surprisingly smart and thoughtful, both in the way it keeps its' resourceful
heroes alive and makes Gabriel a more complex villain than this sort of
story usually gets. By the end, I was surprised by how much of a
stake I had in how it was all going to work out.
As previously stated, I'm
a big Agnes Bruckner fan and she does nothing here to change that.
Vivian's not the most demanding character to play: the notes of courageous,
vulnerable and embittered are the default setting for her generation of
horror movie actresses. But where she shines is in selling the romance
as well as making us believe that Vivian isn't just a worthy adversary
for Gabriel, but could be a worthy successor as well (statesmanship isn't
one of the strong suits of, say, The Hitcher's
Sophia Bush). Dancy is also a better actor than this sort of material
usually commands, with the added advantage that Aiden is a better and more
complex character than he initially appears to be. While the Gabriel
character is quite interesting, Martinez adds little other than stock menace
to the role, and while Dick is imposing when he needs to be, his hairstyle
is really absurd for someone we're supposed to be afraid of.
While the werewolf subject
matter inevitably leads to the “horror” label, there's really nothing scary
about Blood and Chocolate, which is better classified as a thriller.
It's also a resolutely low-budget affair, with humans, wolves, and an odd
little day-glo morphing effect that gets us from one to the other.
The action sequences are pretty small scale, and a climactic burning building
showdown features some of the worst matte work a 2007 theatrical release
could imagine. On the other hand, a sequence where Aiden is hunted
by the entire pack with the promise that he'll be spared if he can make
it to a distant river is brilliantly set up by a parallel hunt early in
the movie and generates genuine suspense. It's also nice to see Bucharest's
impressive architecture get to play itself for a change rather than pretending
to be “unnamed US city where they don't get a lot of sunshine”.
Most of Blood and Chocolate
is pretty familiar, and a lot of it's been done better elsewhere.
But for those who enjoy this “gothic mystical creatures living amongst
us” subgenre, it's got a few surprises up its' sleeves. And it's
got Agnes Bruckner. |
