Entertainment

Cliché-filled ‘Blood’ feels lifeless

The title of the plodding British melodrama “Blood” refers not to the brutal murder of a 12-year-old girl, whose body is discovered in the movie’s opening minutes, but to the relationship between two cop brothers and their dad, a former police inspector known for beating confessions out of suspects.

The brothers (Paul Bettany and Stephen Graham) are convinced that a local pedophile and church volunteer did the girl in. They take him to a lonely, windswept island — once favored by their now-senile father (Brian Cox) — to extract a confession. But matters get out of hand, and the suspect is killed by the cops. The brothers’ troubles are compounded when a fellow officer suspects something is amiss.

The landscape cinematography is often eye-pleasing, but the script is labored, filled with clichés and never allows for character development. The movie began life as a six-hour, BBC-TV miniseries. Redoing it for the big screen, directed by Nick Murphy, was ill-advised.