From the Chicago Reader (August 9, 2002). — J.R.
Blood Work
** (Worth seeing)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Brian Helgeland
With Eastwood, Wanda De Jesus, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston, Tina Lifford, Igor Jijikine, Alix Koromzay, Dylan Walsh, and Paul Rodriguez.
Clint Eastwood’s latest slugfest, Blood Work, is ultimately just another Dirty Harry opus. And by now Harry has become boring, not because Eastwood keeps trying to redefine the character the public tends to remember him for, but because he doesn’t try to redefine the punk villains who keep Harry busy and dirty.
In Blood Work — not technically but generically and existentially a Dirty Harry adventure — the villain is a standard-issue serial killer. It’s a truism that there are more serial killers in movies than there could possibly be in life, and what keeps them mythic seems to have less to do with the world we live in than with the sadistic and infantile ways we like to think about that world. I have come to associate pleasure in cinema with the absence of serial killers, and the pleasure I associate with Blood Work includes everything that doesn’t relate to the silly one lodged near its center. Read more