A poor rip-off of Tarantino and Steve Soderbergh. You could see everything coming from a mile away, and all the fancy cinematic tricks, such as flashbacks, looping chronology and those annoying mini-freeze-frames whcih occur throughout the movie don't help it one bit. Worst of all was Nick Moran's acting. I don't know who he is, but he seemed like he was reading his lines from the first time off a cue card. It was like watching him in a fifth-grade play. I'm sure this director could do a lot better, with maybe better material next time. After all, it's only his first movie. I'd give him another chance. But that Nick Moran yahoo, he's better learn how to bus tables or mix drinks. BTW, Carrie-Ann Moss looked superb.
13 Reviews
What really happened -- I still don't know
scooter-709 August 2001
Trying to follow all the plot twists made my brain hurt. A day later, I still can't figure out what really happened, with all the lies told along the way by the characters.
I *think* there are some plot holes; if things really happened the way it turns out they did, then some things don't make sense. Either that, or the plot is just too convoluted for most people to follow.
Either way, the film left me feeling a bit puzzled. While the acting was good, the film as a whole was disappointing. I voted it 4 (out of 10) for the IMDB.
I *think* there are some plot holes; if things really happened the way it turns out they did, then some things don't make sense. Either that, or the plot is just too convoluted for most people to follow.
Either way, the film left me feeling a bit puzzled. While the acting was good, the film as a whole was disappointing. I voted it 4 (out of 10) for the IMDB.
It had height and width, but no depth.
morpheus-11314 September 2000
This was not a terrible film. It was merely a poor execution of current noir film styles. The pacing was slow. The script was melodramatic in places. It is unfortunate that the dramatic pause has become an overused device. The lighting was film school quality at best. Just because the subject matter is "dark" doesn't mean that I should be unable to see the actors. The editor seemed to be overly entertained by nifty but superfluous techniques. Much like a verbal pause, the film pause can become tiresome and overused. I cannot blame the actors for their flat delivery, I have seen them all in other films giving dynamic and believable performances. If the actors were doing what they were told, then we have to blame the director. The plot was very contrived. It took elements from a number of hit movies (Usual Suspects and City on Fire among them) and smothered them. A number of clichés were employed in an attempt to make us care about the characters. They all failed. In a three dimensional world, two dimensional plots get you nowhere.
Most boring movie I ever saw, a total waste of time
Killer B-210 February 2001
So bland I barely managed to sit through it. A combination of the most dull cliches from every true-crime movie I've ever seen. Predictable plot goes nowhere verrrry slowly. Joe Pantogliano is excellent and barely recognizable. Unfortunately he barely appears in this movie. Carrie-Anne Moss is more feminine and interesting than she was in The Matrix, but she gets about 5 minutes of screen time and less than 10 lines. John Hurt is pretty good in basically the same role he always plays. His character was sort of interesting, for a while. Everything else about the film is breathtakingly average. Even the gunfights are absolutely basic, bare-bones and old hat. Don't waste your time, watch The Matrix or Blade again. And if you just want to see Carrie-Anne naked, go hunt for The Soft Kill, because you won't see that here (the one thing that could have given it SOME value).
Not bad but confused
searchanddestroy-17 July 2022
Only some gunfights scenes are worth in this UK crime flick. Directing is so confused, so is the story telling, and acting totally lousy. Sometimes I got bored, sometimes not, it is very difficult to pronounce some opinion, good or bad. This is a first film, and in very fashion in the early 2000's, in the Guy Ritchie mode. It remained more or less this way during the decade, and even further. With lesser results. John Hurt presence doesn't help at all. But you can try.
Boring and predictable
bioscoopzaal6 May 2000
This was a real stinker. Boring and predictable from beginning to end. And worst of all a complete waste of a great cast including John Hurt, Joe Pantoliano, Carrie-Anne Moss (Cypher and Trinity from The Matrix) and Nick Moran. The center plot revolves around a man (Hurt) whose daughter needs a new heart. They don't seem to be able to find one, until the man's son (Moran) pops up, offering his heart in exchange of his fathers services. The father has to play the part of a kidnapped millionaire who was accidentally killed by Moran's gang. But he can't tell that to his boss and his 'businesspartners' (Pantoliano and Moss). This goes on for a while until the movie wraps up nicely and predictably after a grotesque shootout. 3/10
Just because you saw The Usual Suspects, that doesn't mean you can make a movie like The Usual Suspects.
MBunge29 March 2011
Warning: Spoilers
How stupid do you have to be to not appreciate the difference between getting shot and stubbing your toe? However stupid that is, that's how stupid these filmmakers are. Characters in New Blood get shot, they get shot multiple times, they even get blasted by shotguns
and they essentially just rub some dirt on it and walk it off.
But these aren't just dumb filmmakers. They're dumb filmmakers who watched The Usual Suspects, so viewers of this movie will be repeatedly subjected to pathetic attempts at mimicking the things in that movie by a writer and director who clearly didn't understand what they saw. As wonderful as films like The Usual Suspects are, ostentatiously clever movies like that spawn the absolute worst knock-offs in all of cinema.
This story is about a father named Alan (John Hurt), his estranged and criminally inclined son named Denny (Nick Moran) and his only briefly glimpsed daughter named Emma "Danielle Webb). Emma needs a heart transplant and one night Denny shows up, shot in the gut, and offers to donate his heart to Emma if his dad will do him the ultimate favor. It seems Denny and his thug buddies were hired by a mythically violent gangster named Mr. Ryan (Eugene Robert Glazer) to help kidnap a rich man. The kidnapping goes wrong and, for reasons that don't hold up under any scrutiny, Denny needs Alan to impersonate the rich man and allow himself to be killed. Because Denny agrees to let himself die of his wound and give his heart to Emma, Alan agrees to sacrifice himself. But when Alan finds himself among Denny's fellow kidnappers, he learns that Denny may not have told him the real story and Alan's sacrifice might be for Denny's benefit and not Emma's. The plot kind of falls apart there and there's no actual logic to much that happens after that point.
When I think about the simple, essential story of New Blood, I can see what would have attracted people to this project. The concept of a father and son, separated by years of anger, resentment and neglect, giving up their lives for each other, not out of love but for some advantage you can feel the raw, emotional conflict inherent in that set up. But that conflict never becomes much more than inherent. I don't know if these filmmakers didn't understand the heart of their story or didn't know how to tell it, but they largely ignore it and fill up the movie with a bunch of other crap. The film makes a big deal about how Denny's thug buddies are the closest thing to real family he has, but nothing is ever done with those characters to make them worth a damn to the viewer. Then we get some stuff in the middle of the story about Hellman (Joe Pantoliano), the guy in charge of the kidnap plot. Hellman is supposed to be this awesomely frightening guy, but he's one of the least scary characters I've ever encountered. Firstly, he looks ridiculous with a pencil-thin mustache and a Ben Franklin hairdo. Secondly, I don't know what the heck Pantoliano was going for with his performance but whatever it was, it doesn't work. It's almost like he's intentionally making this supposedly intimidating guy the least intimidating he can to try and fake out the audience or something. And toward the end of the movie we get this stuff with Leigh (Carrie-Anne Moss), the accountant for Mr. Ryan and a woman who schemes as easily as she breathes. The film suddenly becomes all about this con game being played by Denny, Alan and Leigh, which leads up to the most sublimely silly reaction to getting shot I think I've ever seen in a legitimate motion picture. New Blood spends so much time and energy on these tangents that it never manages to put any meat on the bones of its basic father-son conflict.
For all that, though, what truly drags this movie down into the gutter where you sit there and wonder why you're watching it is the acting of Nick Moran. I'm not sure I've seen this guy in anything else, so perhaps he's done better work in other pictures. Here, though, he is the proverbial block of wood. He makes Keanu Reeves look like Laurence Olivier. The dude can't even convincingly convey the pain of being shot in the gut, yet he's largely the main character in the film. John Hurt's work as Alan, even though the character is relentlessly passive and does virtually nothing for the majority of the movie, still blows Moran away every second they're on screen together. As weak as the rest of the storytelling is, if the guy playing Denny had had even rudimentary charisma, you might have been able to overlook some of it.
Don't be fooled by the presence of Hurt, Pantoliano and Moss in the cast. New Blood is a bad, bad movie.
But these aren't just dumb filmmakers. They're dumb filmmakers who watched The Usual Suspects, so viewers of this movie will be repeatedly subjected to pathetic attempts at mimicking the things in that movie by a writer and director who clearly didn't understand what they saw. As wonderful as films like The Usual Suspects are, ostentatiously clever movies like that spawn the absolute worst knock-offs in all of cinema.
This story is about a father named Alan (John Hurt), his estranged and criminally inclined son named Denny (Nick Moran) and his only briefly glimpsed daughter named Emma "Danielle Webb). Emma needs a heart transplant and one night Denny shows up, shot in the gut, and offers to donate his heart to Emma if his dad will do him the ultimate favor. It seems Denny and his thug buddies were hired by a mythically violent gangster named Mr. Ryan (Eugene Robert Glazer) to help kidnap a rich man. The kidnapping goes wrong and, for reasons that don't hold up under any scrutiny, Denny needs Alan to impersonate the rich man and allow himself to be killed. Because Denny agrees to let himself die of his wound and give his heart to Emma, Alan agrees to sacrifice himself. But when Alan finds himself among Denny's fellow kidnappers, he learns that Denny may not have told him the real story and Alan's sacrifice might be for Denny's benefit and not Emma's. The plot kind of falls apart there and there's no actual logic to much that happens after that point.
When I think about the simple, essential story of New Blood, I can see what would have attracted people to this project. The concept of a father and son, separated by years of anger, resentment and neglect, giving up their lives for each other, not out of love but for some advantage you can feel the raw, emotional conflict inherent in that set up. But that conflict never becomes much more than inherent. I don't know if these filmmakers didn't understand the heart of their story or didn't know how to tell it, but they largely ignore it and fill up the movie with a bunch of other crap. The film makes a big deal about how Denny's thug buddies are the closest thing to real family he has, but nothing is ever done with those characters to make them worth a damn to the viewer. Then we get some stuff in the middle of the story about Hellman (Joe Pantoliano), the guy in charge of the kidnap plot. Hellman is supposed to be this awesomely frightening guy, but he's one of the least scary characters I've ever encountered. Firstly, he looks ridiculous with a pencil-thin mustache and a Ben Franklin hairdo. Secondly, I don't know what the heck Pantoliano was going for with his performance but whatever it was, it doesn't work. It's almost like he's intentionally making this supposedly intimidating guy the least intimidating he can to try and fake out the audience or something. And toward the end of the movie we get this stuff with Leigh (Carrie-Anne Moss), the accountant for Mr. Ryan and a woman who schemes as easily as she breathes. The film suddenly becomes all about this con game being played by Denny, Alan and Leigh, which leads up to the most sublimely silly reaction to getting shot I think I've ever seen in a legitimate motion picture. New Blood spends so much time and energy on these tangents that it never manages to put any meat on the bones of its basic father-son conflict.
For all that, though, what truly drags this movie down into the gutter where you sit there and wonder why you're watching it is the acting of Nick Moran. I'm not sure I've seen this guy in anything else, so perhaps he's done better work in other pictures. Here, though, he is the proverbial block of wood. He makes Keanu Reeves look like Laurence Olivier. The dude can't even convincingly convey the pain of being shot in the gut, yet he's largely the main character in the film. John Hurt's work as Alan, even though the character is relentlessly passive and does virtually nothing for the majority of the movie, still blows Moran away every second they're on screen together. As weak as the rest of the storytelling is, if the guy playing Denny had had even rudimentary charisma, you might have been able to overlook some of it.
Don't be fooled by the presence of Hurt, Pantoliano and Moss in the cast. New Blood is a bad, bad movie.
Unrelentingly Horrible
tcobretti25 November 2001
Bad. In the words of my nemesis (Roger Ebert), I hated, hated, hated this movie. I wanted to like this movie. A good cast (Joe Pantliano, Carrie Anne Moss, the guy from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels) can't save this turkey. Bad acting and a dumb script combined with a total absence of plot motion. Don't waste two hours of your life.
Very good suspence thriller
tool_apc10 June 2002
I dont agree with other people's comments about this movie, well maybe that they're dumb and dont understand the plot of this movie which is not very hard to understand and very interesting. This movie keeps you in a suspence until the end and u feel good at the same time when you're shocked. Excellent acting, casting and dialogs, its worth a watch. i'll give it 8/10
this is not a bad one, not excellent either.
mkoskela13 July 2000
This is a typical 90's Crimefilm. Now I've seen lots of films like this lately, and this is not a bad one, not excellent either. Those who watch lots of B-films(like me) might think that this is just ok.
There's good actors, the Script is kinda ok, and there's some welldone gunbattles.
There's good actors, the Script is kinda ok, and there's some welldone gunbattles.
Story telling at its best
jo_gatlinpictures22 September 2002
Quite how this great little movie has slipped undetected is a mystery. A great cast bring real life to a wonderfully twisty narrative that whilst inevitably drawing comparisons to Tarantino and Guy Richie by the nature of the genre, appears fresh and exciting. Don't be put off by the straight to video title, Hurst's ability as a writer is more than matched by his skill behind the camera and he never loses his grip on a story that in other hands might have become a tedious and confusing mess. This is story telling at its best.
Decent Film
christutty5514 December 2004
I didn't catch the very beginning but it was easy to see the plot. One thing that i wondered about in this film was the fact that Nick Moran sounded like an englishman doing an American accent, not a very convincing one! And I also thought this was pointless because John Hurt was English in the film. Dunno if i missed something but i think it would have been easier for Nick Moran just to have been English too because that accent wasn't good at all. Apart from that it was a decent film but not the best I've ever seen. I did like all the plot twists though and they fitted together well and the general acting was good. One to watch but not particularly remember!
As good as Lock stock & two smoking barrels!
leeloo-2412 December 1999
This movie looks a lot like the great movie Lock stock & two smoking barrels. The brilliant script is it´s strength and it throws you from one conclusion to another several times. Also, the acting is superb. Nick Moran, just to mention one of all the stars this film features, has never been better. Those of you who liked "Lock Stock..." must run and see this as soon as it hits the screens! (I had the opportunity to see it in the International filmfestival of Stockholm)
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