The Cold Light of Day is just a plateful of same-old same-old. Don’t expect anything better just because Bruce Willis and Sigourney Weaver are in it, because they are strictly support players and must have fallen on bad days to be in such warmed over mashed potatoes as this. One would think they would have had enough clout to insist on at least colorful character roles.
In the beginning, Henry Cavill’s less-than-promising reunion with his father, Willis, and the rest of his estranged family on a weeklong let’s-get-along-again vacation in Europe suggests promise of something a little new in thrillers, but the theme is dropped almost instantly and what seeds of development it suggests never come to anything. Cavill is away shopping when the entire family and their sailboat disappear, and Cavill goes into a kind of combination tantrum and panic attack that writers Scott Wiper and John Petro and director Mabrouk El Mechri find exciting. Almost no investigation is required to find the boat, and the rest of The Cold Light of Day takes little time out from attacks and captures and escapes and rescues and car chases and foot chases and general gunfiring for anything you would call a plot. The guns sound like howitzers and feature muzzle flares, and the beatings up, usually of helpless people, are such as would fracture jaws and probably break necks, but never accomplish much. There’s a very pretty heroine, but such was my absorption that I lost track of her entirely and can’t inform you about what became of her. Nick of the time rescues come by way of shots from off the screen by characters we didn’t know were there, but nothing rescues us from The Cold Light of Day. Spare yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOHl9d08e3c
