There's no prequel to Blood Ties, but perhaps there should be. It could provide a reason to give a damn about the characters. We could see the development of their conflict, the tension between brothers and the brothers' tension with their lovers. Instead, Guillaume Canet's film hits the ground stumbling as the disjointed picture jumps between characters seemingly at random, and never spends enough time to make us care, or wastes time showing just how shallow these horrible people really are. Coated in the veneer of a throwback crime drama, Blood Ties is an insult to its genre, its cast, and its audience. Set in Brooklyn in 1974, Frank (Billy Crudup) is a lousy cop whose brother Chris (Clive Owen) is out of prison on a work furlough. Their relationship resembles roommates more than people who grew up together, and rather than deal with their estrangement, they're each wrapped up in their own silly problems. Frank behaves like a stalker to steal back Vanessa (Zoe Saldana) from her reformed boyfriend Anthony (Matthias Schoenaerts), and Chris makes a half-hearted attempt at living a clean life before quickly falling back into old habits and also falling into the pretty and shallow Natalie (Mila Kunis). Meanwhile, Chris' old squeeze Monica (Marion Cotillard), who is also a drug-addict prostitute and mother of his two children, is off waiting to become a plot point. There's nothing necessarily wrong with dropping us into the middle of an active conflict, but Blood Ties has no idea how to manage ...
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