(This review may contain spoilers).
The trailer for this movie left me intrigued, although I felt the blurb actually gave away more than the film itself actually did, as it seemed to put a different spin on what the brothers were trying to do.
While I did like seeing the relationship between the brothers… I actually really disliked Tanner. I thought Toby seemed to come across as a more sympathetic person, even though there were hints about their pasts that might have given his brother more depth if they’d been followed through on a bit more.
It was interesting to see the relationship Toby had with his sons and ex-wife, though I would have liked some more details about the history between them. While there was some time spent on showing the relationships between Toby and Tanner and Marus and Alberto, I felt there was more time spent on the action and shootings than on character development.
I didn’t really like Marcus very much for a lot of the movie and I couldn’t really figure out why he and Alberto were partners. It wasn’t until towards the end of the movie that I even had the impression Marcus even cared about Alberto.
There were some intriguing secondary characters in this film, but I felt that a lot of the potential subplots didn’t really go anywhere. I think this movie would have benefited from being a bit longer and maybe even a bit more focused on the parallels between the brothers and between the partners. But it was good to see the irony involved with Marcus in particular.
There were quite a few tense scenes in this and although the ending wasn’t much of a surprise, I liked seeing the kind of planning going into the robberies and it was good to see Toby as the more ‘think things through’ brother.
This movie was entertaining to watch and it was interesting to see a Western set in the modern day, with smartphones and computers. I just felt that the movie was missing something.
Ink of Blood 