Infamous assassin Henry (Jean Reno) takes shelter in a remote Washington cabin after carrying out a high-profile hit on a powerful business magnate in New York. At the same time, a young woman, Melody (Sarah Lind), begins a trek across the snow-covered wilderness with the mysterious and relentless Malcolm (David Gyasi) hot on her tail. Melody has a gruesome snowmobile accident somewhere near the cabin Henry has made his home.
Against his paranoia and better judgment, Henry takes the young woman in, bringing her back from the verge of death. The plot thickens and coalesces as the detectives Davies (Ihor Ciszkewycz) and Kappa (Joe Anderson) continue their investigation into the death of the business magnate, drawing closer to identifying the killer and his hiding place. The film ends during several standoffs at the cabin as Melody reveals her true intentions and Henry responds to the compounding threats that have come to his door.
Cold Blood was a drearily average action film in many ways: The plot is thin, the mysteries are transparent, the motivations are unclear, and there are many gaping holes throughout the story. The cast of mostly European extras with poorly-masked accents and hilarious attempts to convince the viewer that this film wasn’t shot in Ukraine add some bizarre b-movie enjoyment to the film, but the movie’s self-serious nature keeps these slip-ups from being campy. In many ways, Cold Blood tries to do far too much and falls flat on its face because of it.
The sci-fi element of Henry using frozen bullets for assassinations and the ‘wolf with a taste for human blood’ receive a surprising amount of consideration and screen time for how little they have to do with the plot while why and how two Washington State cops ended up with a New York case is never properly addressed while having just about everything to do with the plot. The entire mystery of the film is easy to see from the very beginning once it’s made clear that Melody isn’t who she says she is and that her crash was no accident.
Much of the acting beyond the named characters are amateurish and robotic at best, extras and minor characters carry out actions that make little to no sense, and the self-serious nature of the film makes things that may have been funny feel awkward. There are some beautiful shots, wonderful nature, and some gut-wrenching wilderness survival elements to the movie, but ultimately Cold Blood is not a necessary purchase.