The Cold Light of Day

2012

Action / Adventure / Crime / Drama / Mystery / Thriller

49
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 29% · 47 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 29% · 10K ratings
IMDb Rating 4.9/10 10 41107 41.1K

government espionage spying kidnapping

Plot summary

After his family is kidnapped during their sailing trip in Spain, a young Wall Street trader is confronted by the people responsible: intelligence agents looking to recover a mysterious briefcase.

Director

Mabrouk El Mechri Photo
Mabrouk El Mechri

Top cast

Henry Cavill Photo
Henry Cavill as Will
Jim Piddock Photo
Jim Piddock as Meckler
Sigourney Weaver Photo
Sigourney Weaver as Jean Carrack
Joseph Mawle Photo
Joseph Mawle as Gorman
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
602.14 MB
1280*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 33 min
Seeds ...
1.50 GB
1920*1080
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 33 min
Seeds 14

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by key_man 6 / 10

Fun to Watch -- but Flawed

This movie was not a classic spy-thriller by any means, but it was still fun to watch.There were a variety of weak plot points that took away dramatically from the film. The worst of which was that in the film Bruce Willis' cellphone was totally unlocked (no password or encryption of any kind to access all features) --- this for an average phone owner would be rare, but for a long-time CIA operative would NEVER be the case. Given that accessing the phone was critical to progress of the story-line this should not have been overlooked.
Reviewed by ScottPortals 6 / 10

How is this rated so low?

Ok it's not a work of art but once things get going this movie is tense and doesn't let up until the end. The acting is solid aside from Sigourney Weaver who was a miscast in my opinion. Lines were all flat except for one. Henry Cavill is great as the lead, with emotions and intensity that make sense given the situation. Bruce Willis is convincing and the rest of the cast all put in good performances. If you're a fan of car chases, the finale of this delivers a long one.Everything else worked with solid cinematography. There aren't a bunch of quick shots where you can't tell what's happening. The action scenes benefit the most from this and there's no CGI that I could see. It's an entertaining thriller/action flick that doesn't cheat with what it's delivering.
Reviewed by moviexclusive 4 / 10

Spies are smart and spy movies deserve to be clever - but this is not

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 cameras, you would be hard pressed to find any shot of action that isn't obscured in any way.It's a shame because The Cold Light of Day has a talented cast which can actually do justice to the action. However, none of them bothers to offer a performance that's required to make other scenes work. Cavill comes across poorly as a man who's truly shocked that his family's been kidnapped, responding to a call from the kidnappers with an uncanny calmness while Weaver maintains a surprisingly stoical composure throughout. Willis's character is quickly written out of the story before he could show his acting chops. In a year filled with other spy movies like Total Recall, The Bourne Legacy and the upcoming Bond film, The Cold Light of Day looks like a distant relative.
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