3 out of 5

Director: Mabrouk El Mechri

Interestingly nuanced character development and some totally-wrong-genre inventive camera work bring ‘Cold Light of Day’ out of its DTV-feel shell to something tolerable as a nigh-professional flick.  It’s still uneven and silly, but it fulfills the long-awaited ‘Executive Decision’ style role for Willis and harkens back to the type of caught-it-on-cable quality action that used to be such a common weekend viewing on USA or TNT or etcetera.  So Henry Cavill has relented to a family vacation in Spain, all aboard Dad’s boat with mom, his brother, and his brother’s girlfriend.  Dad – Willis – is a stoic patriarch, and the silent interactions between father and son are honestly pretty rich and realistic feeling, drawing on emotions many of us can probably relate to to some degree and indicating a bit where JCVD director Mabrouk El Mechri’s place is in this.  Cavill – Will Shaw – is on his phone, learning some bad news about business back home, stuck on this bad vacation, and so decides to swim ashore.  When he returns… boat and family are gone.  And when his father pops back up to report that “they” have the rest of the family, Will learns that Dad may be a different man than he supposed, and his bad business news at home pales in comparison to getting shot at.  Cue the “one man” style movie, where suddenly we all know how to shoot guns and be a stunt driver, but it’s executed slickly and with just the right dash of style to not be annoying, with the plot stopping to breathe long enough to pepper in some sense.  But yeah, those character nuances are sorta gone by that point, and Mechri guides us through some really interesting zooms and angles that belong in some intense thriller and not an action flick.  Totally average, but of better overall quality than your average average.