Blood Father is a well-shot, well-directed film that ends up falling into traditional action-thriller genre trappings too often to amount to anything special.

The movie follows recovering alcoholic ex-convict John Link (Mel Gibson) who is dragged back into the criminal world when his estranged daughter Lydia (Erin Moriarty) comes back into his life, Mexican gang members on her tail. If the premise sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen it before in the Die Hard series, Stolen and most notably the Liam Neeson-lead Taken series.

To its credit, Blood Father executes the basic premise of the father-daughter action movie better than most. Gibson in particular bring the right amount of gravitas and wit to his role as John, making his motivations — his love for his daughter, and his struggle with alcoholism — feel very real while also making his reactions to very serious situations laugh-out-loud funny. Moriarty, whilst coming off as unconvincing at times, also does a competent job at acting out the troubled wild child archetype.

Visually, it’s at times very stylishly and thoughtfully filmed. The first third of the film in particular stands out, with editing and shot choice used well to fulfil a narrative purpose, as well as a few clever visual gags that are genuinely funny. Yet the film sacrifices these shots for generic action-movie camerawork in the last (more action-packed) half of the film. The narrative develops similarly; the first half of the film is full of competent character development and decent writing, but the film is let down by its second half which sacrifices this for the traditional action film formula.

The movie has many problems, most of which have to do with how close it sticks to the formula; unfortunately, it also sticks to the formula where its female characters lack any meaningful role or autonomy in the narrative. At the end of the day, it’s an enjoyable, pulpy film that doesn’t quite bring enough new material to the table.

Mikhail Hanafi 

(Image courtesy of All Star/Warner Bros)