You wait for a review of a Bruce Willis film, or maybe you don't, but two come along at once nonetheless but if you were hoping for more of him after his handful of appearances in The Expendables 2 you may be disappointed. Despite appearing fairly prominently on the poster for The Cold Light of Day, Mr Willis' appearances add up to no more than about 15 minutes of the 90 minute run time so any fans of the Die Hard star who would be watching this film for him alone might want to look elsewhere. Willis plays Martin Shaw a man who has a job working for the government booking philharmonic orchestras or something to that effect, yeah right, and is currently in Spain with his family on a fishing trip. Arriving in Spain is his son Will, played by the new Superman Henry Cavill, who doesn't seem to have a great relationship with his father and they argue over Will's instance to make business calls while on the trip a decision that later injures his brother's girlfriend. He goes to town to get some medicine for her but when he returns he finds his family missing and later discovers they have been kidnapped by some shadowy folks who want a briefcase back from his father who is in fact a CIA agent, shock horror! Will and Martin briefly reunite as we are introduced to his partner, Sigourney Weaver's Jean, who may or may not have turned against him to sell said briefcase and the bigger question is who exactly Will can trust. Later on in the film he meets a sexy senorita by the name of Lucia who in addition to helping him escape may also be able to shed some light on his father's dealing in the past as the two have a slightly unbelievable connection.
I think The Cold Light of Day has its roots firmly in the old school Alfred Hitchcock thrillers in which the action is all controlled by a MacGuffin, which for those not in the know is an object that moves the plot along even if it isn't that important, however that would be an insult to Hitchcock's collections of films. The MacGuffin here is the mysterious briefcase which everybody is after even though we never discover what is in it, though as Willis is here maybe it's Marcellus Wallace's soul, but I never once cared and that's the major problem with this film. There's a lot of running, jumping and shooting in the film however if it's all based on a plot point that you don't care about then everything seems a little bit pointless despite the fact that all the action sequences are fairly well shot. Personally I didn't think Henry Cavill was a particularly captivating lead but to be fair to the actor has little to work with playing a character who owns some sort of small business which is on the verge collapsing and who also has a poor relationship with his character. Willis is in his action movie default setting as he gets to both play the slightly brooding patriarch and the gun-wielding CIA agent in his brief time on screen in what amounts to no more than an extended cameo. The two performances I enjoyed were from Sigourney Weaver who makes for a tremendous central villain and British actor Joseph Mawle has her creepy henchman. The Spanish setting also means that the running, jumping and shooting gets some lovely backdrops to be shot against but I don't think this is fully utilised as there are more sequences in dingy clubs and dark houses than there on the streets of Spain. Though I did like seeing Weaver brandishing a gun and being badass there's only so much of that you can take in one film and due to the lack of any decent characters and a story that is fairly one-dimensional I got bored of The Cold Light of Day fairly quickly.
Verdict: Though the Spanish backdrop and Sigourney Weaver's villainous turned did provide brief highlights overall The Cold Light of Day suffers from an uninvolving leading man, a threadbare plot and fairly dull action scenes so for that reason I'll have to give it 4.5/10
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