The Cold Light of Day (2012)

Well I wasn't expecting much from this film to begin with and I certainly wasn't wrong with how the film panned out. When I arrived in the theatre there was background music playing over the trailers and adverts. This even continued into the start of the film! Therefore I couldn't actually hear what was going on for the first 3 or 4 minutes. I should have known what my experience was going to be like after that. I thought the film had a promising start with Willis being about the only semblance of my enjoyment. But it all went downhill after the first 25 minutes or so. I thought the script was dire and the action sequences were poorly directed. In some of the scenes I could plainly tell an effort was being made by the director to imitate some classic action scenes in the Bourne series. The whole business with the briefcase also left a lot to be desired.

Weaver's performance was puzzling. She appears as a ruthless agency operative but at points in the film I was wondering if she thought she was starring in a comedy with her outrageous behaviour in some of the end scenes. Overall I'd say save your money for a better film that doesn't try to rip off other films in its genre.

Fmovies: This is my first ever comment on IMDb and it is the only time i've found it imperative to do so, simply to say that this is the worst movie I have ever seen.

I think the whole movie was just used as a base to plug any product the makers could find, form coke to blackberry, using Bruce Willis to help with it. Oh how the mighty have become desperate.

From the terrible acting to the obvious clichés, this movie needs to be buried deep underground and never dug up.

Do yourselves a favour and save yourselves 90 minutes of your lives, maybe even take up a hobby, like watching paint dry.

It's hard to really pin down what The Cold Light of Day is supposed to achieve. It reads like a concept reel for emerging leading man Henry Cavill who will proceed to star as Superman in next year's Man of Steel but it makes so many concessions to the sensibilities of a spy movie that it's never going to be a real jumping point for Cavill. Director Mabrouk El Mechri is almost entirely to blame here, making the most unremarkable decisions that force us to reexamine the intrinsic cleverness of spy fiction. The result is a watery, meandering spy movie that manages even at its best moments to be completely ordinary.

Will Shaw (Henry Cavill) is barely a day into his vacation in Spain when financial problems at home in San Francisco threaten to shorten the trip. After a dispute with his father (Bruce Willis) on the family's rented boat, Will decides to swim ashore for a break. He returns to find his family gone and a call for help at the local police station ends in more trouble. Discovering that he can recover his kidnapped family by giving up a certain briefcase, Will must beat the clock to unravel the underlying mystery but not before he encounters corrupted CIA agent (Sigourney Weaver) and his lost sister (Verónica Echegui).

On one hand, it's easy to be enthusiastic about engrossing yourself in the story but on the other, The Cold Light of Day gives very few reasons why you should. Better spy movies have thrived on providing viewers with at least some clue on what motivates each character to retrieve an important object, kill a person or escape from capture so the audience can make sense of what transpires on screen. The Cold Light of Day, quite questionably, never reveals or alludes to the life-or-death contents of the briefcase, meaning the biggest difficulty is in believing the necessity of all the carnage. It's perfectly reasonable that Will is willing to fire his first shot and participate in a mad car chase only because he wants to save his family. But it's hardly convincing to have pockets of mercenaries and agents chasing a briefcase that might as well be empty.

Such is the silliness of The Cold Light of Day that it often struggles to establish what exactly any of its characters intend to accomplish. If Weaver's character is indeed the CIA agent she claims to be, then she must be the dumbest agent to ever be enlisted. With the briefcase already tucked away in her car seat, she turns a mission-accomplished situation into a senseless civilian killing spree as she trades car paint with Will's vehicle down the busy streets of Madrid. Spy movies usually ask the audience to forgive some disbelief in order to enjoy them but The Cold Light of Day is by far the most demanding. The slightest bit of investigation into the weak plot will crumble the movie faster than a fragile egg tart.

Fortunately, there remains a vestige of believability in Will. As an innocent civilian unwittingly hooked into a web of dangerous games between mercenaries and agents, Cavill brings a sort of genuine clumsiness to his role, allowing the audience to easily buy his character. For this reason, there won't be any explosive set-piece or many scenes featuring hand-to-hand combat. There're a few tricks to prevent the action scenes from becoming too stale and while some of the stunts are decent efforts, others don't always work. Handcuffed between the tragic decision to set most of the action scenes in the night and the already blurry shots of fast-moving action taken by hand-held c

The Cold Light of Day fmovies. This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The cinematography is migraine-inducing, the directing is pathetic and the main character is laughable with the most exaggerated of acting methods. It seems the entire premise of the movie is to blur in and out of frames while affording no story, no character development and ultimately no point to over half of the existing scenes.

I did not have the opportunity to walk out of the theater because of the company I was with. However, if I could, I would have because it is simply impossible to maintain any interest in this movie. I do not think it is worth seeing anything this director makes in the future.

If I have to describe this movie with just one word, this will be: "flat".

It is when a movie tries so hard to be original when you know that it will fail miserably in doing so.

From the start the movie is victim of a thousands clichés that on and on progress from worse to unbearable as the movie end.

There is no character progression whatsoever, dialogs are flat, there are no indications of a script, there is none in fact.. Two sides looking for a briefcase that contains a "something" that is not even mentioned in the end is a pathetic attempt as a plot resource.

Even worse is the fact that Bruce Willis is non-existent in the movie, he is basically just for the sake of putting his face in the front cover of the movie.

Sigourney tries so hard with SO little, she surely doesn't need to accept this kinds of roles, specially with movies such as this one.

There are so many plot holes and incoherences that I completely lost all my interest 50% into the movie, for example, in the first 40 minutes of action, our main character was surrounded by cops as soon as he displays a gun, he couldn't move without being surrounded by cops, he even manage to have a warrant order for arrest from the local police, but, incredibly enough, the last 40 minutes of the movie we see car crashes, tourist and local people being killed for no reason, shooting in the streets, so on and so forth with ZERO cops, totally ridiculous!

The movies is a pathetic attempt at an action movie, flat and excessive in violence for no other reason than the lack of a good script.

It doesn't even deserve a 2 in my scale, since any B-movie will surpass this one very easily.

My advice, do not waste your time on this one, it's flat, boring, very unoriginal, being done a million times before and much better.. if you want to see real action with a good script, please, rent or take out of your personal collection the first Die Hard, you will be much more entertained, even if you saw it a hundred times.

Total waste of good actors.

1 out of 10, horrible.

If I could give this movie a 0/10, I would.

First off, and the only good thing about this movie is, there were some great actors and actresses in this movie. However, they couldn't pull off their respective roles really well.

Bruce Willis is made out to be, according to the movie poster, a lead character. Instead, he was only in the movie for the first 20-25 minutes.

Sigourney Weaver was the movie's villain. Her character tried to project a calm, cold/chilling, I don't give a crap demeanor. Instead, she just came off as sounding silly.

The plot was predictable, as was every scene in the movie. Product placement in the movie couldn't have been any more obvious.

It doesn't make sense how the movie's hero, a Wall Street trader, is able to outrun and outsmart trained CIA agents...

There are too many flaws in this movie to summarize it in 1000 words or less so, if you are going to watch, be prepared to be bored to tears...