BAD ‘COLD’
Cranston breaks out brutal accent as thug
Hey, look at this: It’s the archetypal early-January junk flick, dumped right at our doorstep! True to form, this wanna be-tough drama features an accidentally hilarious element that earns it one star. In this case, it’s Bryan Cranston, fresh from his brilliant bowout on “Breaking Bad.” Here he plays a caricature of a foreign gangster, complete with a silly “Boris and Natasha”-style accent.
His name is Topo, but despite that — and being nearly blind — he acts tough with Chloe (Alice Eve). She’s the proprietress of the dingy motel where Topo and his nephew stop en route to delivering a trunk full of dirty money to fellow badasses.
“Eees man in picture girl’s father?” Topo, with his broken English, asks Chloe, who lives at the motel with her young daughter. Chloe’s a widow, and when Topo’s car is stolen and his nephew is killed (“Good help hard to find,” he says), he takes Chloe hostage so she can lead him to the car and the cash.
Cranston, in a fake beard and dark glasses, seems to be enjoying his goofy act. Trouble is, this isn’t the kind of movie in which goofy earns goodwill.
Eve quashes her charm and glams down to haul buckets between motel rooms, looking the other way as working girls ply their trade in them. It’s all part of the working-class gloom that director Tze Chun pours on. Topo’s arrival, then, is like something out of a 1980s David Lynch film, a self-conscious nod to another genre. Also out of place: Logan MarshallGreen as a married, unethical cop Chloe leans on for help.
As for the meaning of that Raymond Chandler-esque title ... who knows? Maybe it means, as Topo might say, “Even if stuck een polar vortex, is wrong movie to zee.”
jneumaier@nydailynews.com