I caught Guillaume Canet‘s Blood Ties at the Cannes Film Festival last year and was not impressed, beginning my review as follows:
There are so many secondary plot threads and a multitude of characters in Blood Ties the film finds itself sputtering along, stopping and starting every 5-10 minutes as characters are introduced and re-introduced. There’s absolutely no way for the story to work within the confines of a two-and-a-half-hour movie as it either needs to be cut down to two hours or less or extended into a five-to-six-hour miniseries or more. It’s a shame, really, because there are some fantastic moments within this film just as much as there are some moments and casting decisions I really could have done without, but all-in-all the end result is a bit of a mess.
Well, fast forward to the Toronto Film Festival four months later and Canet apparently cut something like 20 minutes from the running time and now the film is in the hands of Roadside Attractions with a planned March 21 theatrical and On Demand release scheduled. Having last seen the film about eight months ago I must admit I’m a little curious to see how it plays now.
The film is an English-language remake of Jacques Maillot’s 2008 French film Rivals (Les liens du sang) and stars Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana, James Caan, Noah Emmerich, Matthias Schoenaerts and Marion Cotillard among others.
The story is set in New York in 1974 and follows two brothers (Crudup and Owen) on both sides of the law, who must face off over organized crime in Brooklyn during the 1970s. Crudup plays a cop while Owen’s character is an auto repair shop owner and ex-convict who’s asked to go back into the criminal underworld to help out the family.
Today the first official domestic trailer and poster have arrived, both of which can be viewed below. To read my Cannes review just click here.
