First he needs to get this girl clean. Not easy. Then he needs to get the truth out of her. Not easy. Now armed with the truth, which is a very bad situation that just gets worse with each passing minute, he needs a plan to try to save his baby girl. Damn near impossible. We don't know much, this we have established earlier in this article, be we are going to assume that this kid is gonna get 'Taken', and somebody with years on them is going to have to dust off some special skills to get her back. Maybe. This particular movie has me a little concerned.
Directed by Jean Francois Richet, a cat who comes to the table packing some serous credibility if you have by chance seen his Public Enemy films made back in his home nation of France, 'Blood Father' is an impressive film if only because it is so damn simple. A story about a father with certain abilities trying save his daughter from a bad situation is not the most original story around, but that's okay. It's okay because the star of this tried and true opus is Mel Gibson and all a good director needs to do is get out of his way and let him do his thing. I don't want to sell this movie short and portray this film as yet another copy of 'Taken' because the character of Link isn't Bryan Mills. He's tough, but he's not necessarily a badass. He's certainly not someone we could classify as a 'good person'. He has an honor code he lives by… but it is a fairly corrupt one. But still… we root for the guy because we feel he is truly trying to do right.
Another thing that works in this movie is the character of Lydia, as Erin Moriarty is stuck playing probably my least favorite character type in the history of everything, the bratty disrespectful teenager. Oh… I hate that character with a passion. But I don't know, maybe because the kid can actually act, or maybe it's because her character is so adorably dorky and clueless… instead of hoping she'd catch a stray bullet at some point in this movie, like I do for most bratty teenagers in movies like this, I was genuinely concerned for her well-being.
Are there any issues with the movie? I guess the villains were kind of underwhelming, but then this was more of a relationship based action movie so we can't deduct too many points away from that. If we had a point system. Which we don't. Mel Gibson's character of Link had the look of a biker dude who spent the majority of his life in and out of prison, but he sounded like Mel Gibson the Yale college professor. But again, if Mr. Gibson actually did try to mimic some kind of biker-esque drawl, that would just come off as silly. And the movie at its core was very basic. And we aren't mad about that either because we appreciate a director who is skilled enough to NOT show me how skilled he can be. We already know what Richet can do, and this time he let his aging star, the simple story and the cute kid show the way. 'Blood Father' might not be the most ambitious movie ever made, but it's a damned entertaining one.
