BLOOD AND BONE: Old School Moves With An Old School Groove

If you want a good action film today, for­get find­ing one at the mul­ti­plex.  The genre died a slow death dur­ing the 1990’s, with tra­di­tional action hero fare slowly get­ting phased out by star vehi­cles that spend sev­eral times more money to deliver sev­eral times less action.  Thankfully, action heroes found a new home in the straight-to-video mar­ket.  A few — most notably Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren — have man­aged to make movies that are bet­ter than the ones that made them famous.

Newer stars have man­aged to rise up in this post-theatrical mar­ket­place as well.  One of the best and bright­est is Michael Jai White, a gifted actor who has been at it since the 1990’s.  He’s worked steadily with­out ever quite break­ing through to the big time but he stays in the game and deliv­ers qual­ity work.  Blood And Bone is a solid action-star vehi­cle for White, show­ing off his skills in a like­ably old-school set­ting that gives them plenty of room to shine.

The film starts with Isaiah Bone (White) dis­play­ing his fight­ing prowess by lay­ing waste to a gang of shiv-toting thugs in a prison bath­room.  A few years later, he emerges from the joint and method­i­cally begins enact­ing a plan that only he knows.  It starts with him enter­ing the Los Angeles street-fighting scene, team­ing with mouthy pro­moter Pinball (Dante Basco) to earn cash and notoriety.

Bone becomes an unbeat­able champ on the scene and comes to the atten­tion of James (Eamonn Walker), a mid-level crime boss with a love of under­ground fight­ing and a beau­ti­ful but heroin-addled wife named Angela (Michelle Belegrin).  James starts plot­ting to put Bone into an under­ground fight in the wealthy, exclu­sive cir­cuit presided over by his boss, Franklin McVeigh (Julian Sands).  Bone reluc­tantly joins in because he is drawn to Angela — but this attrac­tion is not what it seems and his true plans become revealed as the big fight draws near.

Blood And Bone is very sat­is­fy­ing action fare because it knows exactly what its audi­ence wants and serves it up with a clas­sic sense of style.  Michael Andrews’ script doesn’t offer much in the way of sur­prises but it knows the beats of the action-star vehi­cle well and lays them out in a clean, dis­ci­plined style.  It draws its char­ac­ters in broad strokes, infuses the pro­ceed­ings with a bit of heart at the nec­es­sary points and deliv­ers plenty of qual­ity set-ups for daz­zling fight scenes.

Director Ben Ramsey, per­haps best-known for writ­ing The Big Hit, han­dles the sim­ple tale well.  His visu­als are styl­ish with­out being showy and he gets solid per­for­mances from his actors.  White is allowed to carry the film and he does so in a sub­tle but con­fi­dent way,  under­play­ing with a Clint Eastwood-like flinti­ness and allow­ing his pres­ence to do talk­ing that dia­logue wouldn’t be able to achieve. The film also offers a few unusu­ally well-developed roles for women and the actresses do well: Belegrin offers the right mix of weari­ness as sor­row as the damsel in dis­tress and Nona Gaye shows a strong pres­ence as the tough land­lady who cir­cles White with wary interest.

Ramsey also allows a few of his cast mem­bers to go for a broader style of per­for­mance.  Walker gets to chew a bit of scenery in his vil­lain­ous role but never devolves into a car­toon and Basco deliv­ers a like­able ver­sion of the fast-talking side­kick arche­type.  However, it’s Sands who is the big scene stealer in this cat­e­gory: a scene where he has a ver­bal duel with Walker is an art­ful dis­play of cheerfully-unleashed venom.

However, the key weapon in Blood And Bone’s arse­nal is its action and it is han­dled beau­ti­fully on both sides of the cam­era.  Sam Hargrave and Fernando Chien’s fight chore­og­ra­phy has a bone-crunching inten­sity to it and Ramsey wisely keeps the cam­era at enough of a dis­tance to allow its com­plex­ity to unfold before the viewer’s eyes.  Thankfully, the temp­ta­tion for flash-cut edit­ing is avoided and this makes it eas­ier to appre­ci­ate for the per­form­ers’ hard work.  White, a real mar­tial artist, is at the cen­ter of most of the fights and his grace­ful moves are as con­fi­dent and focused as his charisma.

The care­ful atten­tion to craft at all phases of the film — and the ded­i­ca­tion shown by said crafts­man­ship — makes Blood And Bone a taut, skillfully-engineered vari­a­tion on a clas­sic for­mat.  White per­forms with skill and per­son­al­ity, just as he did in the comedically-oriented Black Dynamite, and the level of range he shows between the two films makes one hope that he’ll even­tu­ally make it to the big leagues.

Until then, it would be a nice to have a few more films like this.  It seems the old-school action film has some life in yet.