Blood Money (2017)

Director Lucky McKee and screenwriters Jared Butler and Lars Norberg take a standard premise and tweak it sufficiently to make it interesting and, at times, even darkly humorous.

This open-air thriller is decently crafted by director Lucky McKee (whose prior films have landed closer to horror terrain), and it eventually summons up enough seriocomic neo-noir perversity to comprise a fun, semi-guilt-free ride.

Coltrane displays a range he hasn’t shown before onscreen, dipping into darker realms as the romantically spurned blue collar townie Victor. But Fitzgerald runs away with Blood Money as femme fatale Lynn.

For an hour, Lucky McKee’s Blood Money is aggressively annoying, the kind of film with no likable or believable characters, and one of those cheap VOD flicks in which it feels like everyone was there purely for the paycheck.

Structurally, director Lucky McKee (Hah!) chooses to tell this story in flashback so we know the scope of the final conflict. The finale is unsatisfying in the extreme — suggesting nobody here actually watched “Sierra Madre.”