Blood Simple

Circle Films | Release Date: January 18, 1985

8.0	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 132 Ratings

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juliankennedy23Jul 8, 2014

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Blood Simple: 6 out of 10: Some movies are victims of their own success. Alien is a great film but it seems a little slow nowadays and the plot while very fresh in 1979 has been done to death. (I still love it mind you but if I saw it for the first time this year I would probably wonder what the big deal is) The surprise is gone. I bring that up because at its time Blood Simple was a critics darling. A breath of very fresh air in our nations multiplexes. Not anymore.

This kind of noir has been done to death since the Coen brothers revived it twenty plus years ago and Blood Simple through no fault of its own suffers as a result. The plot of the jealous husband and double crosses has had so many spins of the same record (1/2 of them seemingly starring Tim Matheson) that the original simply doesn't have the freshness or power it undoubtedly had back in '84.

The movie has great strengths still however. Seeing Frances McDormand looking this cute reminds me of see Lucille Ball or Bette Davis in one of their first films when they were sex objects. And while John Getz gets swallowed up in his straight role Dan Hedaya (Cheers) on the other hand plays sleazy so well I forget I have seen it so many times since.

Overall very well done if slightly slow paced and certainly worth a view just too familiar to encourage a repeat viewing.… Expand

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Compi24Nov 20, 2015

Though this freshman effort may provide promising hints into the beautiful careers that would develop over time from the Coen brothers, "Blood Simple" itself is an ultimately unsatisfying film with uninspired characters and a sluggish pace.

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HotelCentralJan 31, 2016

I guess if you lived in a small Texas town where watching the water tower rust is a big nightly thrill then "Blood Simple" might seem worthy of high praise. Myself, I found it to be dull. Very dull. The characters all seem a bit dull too,I guess if you lived in a small Texas town where watching the water tower rust is a big nightly thrill then "Blood Simple" might seem worthy of high praise. Myself, I found it to be dull. Very dull. The characters all seem a bit dull too, both in the sense of being uninteresting as well as just a bit dense or stupid. The plot structure is less a peeling away of the onion than a series of misadventures in which things get progressively worse, which is usually what happens when a bunch of stupid, dense stupid leap to conclusions based on scanty evidence and then refrain from clearing things up through the use of some obvious dialog. The final scene is just the slightest bit exciting, but the question is whether it's worth sitting through 90+ minutes of relative boredom to get there. I would say catch a few episodes of Seinfeld.… Expand

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FilipeNetoNov 14, 2018

This is another "film noir" signed by the Cohen Brothers, who sign the direction and the script. One more on a sizable list, as they like the "noir" style and a clever twist of cynical irony. However, this film isn't new and I don't know toThis is another "film noir" signed by the Cohen Brothers, who sign the direction and the script. One more on a sizable list, as they like the "noir" style and a clever twist of cynical irony. However, this film isn't new and I don't know to what extent it will age well, or it will turn into a minor work of Cohens' cinematography.

The film has many interesting aspects, mainly in the most technical questions. Cinematography is very elegant and cleverly uses the light and shadow, high contrast, washed colors and car headlights. Although I don't have any data in my hands right now, I dare to hypothesize that they have used wide-angle lenses during filming. I'm just guessing. However, the main problem of this film is the script.

The whole plot is based on a love triangle between Abby, her lover, Ray, and her husband, Marty, who decides to kill them, driven by jealousy, corrupting a private investigator to do the dirty work. But things end up going bad for Marty and everything gets complicated, as the plot gives several twists. The virtual absence of soundtrack, the focus on dialogue, the atmosphere of latent suspicion between characters and their moral ambiguity are characteristics that we can see, and that are usual in "noir" movies. This is all very good and would have been even better if there weren't problems in between: to begin with, the film takes too long to engage and arouse our interest. In fact, the beginning is too slow to have a significant initial impact. Dialogues can also be very boring. Finally, there is another problem: it is absolutely loaded with holes. If I were a CSI technician, it would have been the quickest and easiest criminal investigation of my career.

About as the actors, I liked them overall, but I was not impressed. John Getz and Frances McDormand, despite being the main actors, didn't shined, doing only what they had to do. Dan Hedaya had the task of giving life to an obnoxious but fundamental character, and I liked his work. However, I think M. Emmet Walsh deserves more prominence than them. It's through the cynical and obtuse look of his character that we see the film (he works, partly, as a narrator) and it's he who assumes preponderance in the way events unfold, giving him a protagonism that would hardly have had if wasn't the case. The actor really struggled, so the character can almost be absolutely repellent by embodying, in a visual and palpable way, his dubious morality and lack of scruples.

In short, this is an interesting worth-watching movie but may not please most of the audiences, as it's rather slow and takes it's time to develop. However, being one of the first Cohen's films, it's a milestone for their careers.… Expand

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