Don’t mess with John Cusak.

Today I watched Blood Money, a very uniquely named film from 2017. Blood Money has a big and very obvious lesson we’ve learned numerous times before; if you come across a large sum of cash in a bag in the forest, LEAVE IT ALONE. If you find that sack of money in the woods after encountering shady looking dudes who seem to be looking for something, then double don’t touch it. And if the person you encounter is John Cusack, triple don’t touch it.

Unless you take like a stack of hundreds and leave the rest. The key is to take so little money that the guys you’re stealing from won’t notice or possibly care enough to come after you. Ultimately you don’t want to let your greed control your logic center, which is exactly why the characters in these movies tend to get in trouble and ultimately get killed.

Directed by Luck McKee. John Cusack plays Miller, a criminal in the woods looking for his cash. Unfortunately for him his cash is found by Lynn (Willa Fitzgerald) who conveniently has busted up her knee and needs the money to pay for college or potentially a new knee. Ellar Coltrane who you may know from Boyhood plays Victor, Lynn’s ex-boyfriend and wussy simp who drops out pretty early in the movie and leaves the crew because he knows how stupid stealing millions of dollars in criminal cash is. Jacob Artist plays Jeff, Lynn’s current boyfriend and punk ass loser.

Second lesson of this film is that when your girlfriend/ex-girlfriend finds a ton of money in the forest and immediately turns into a cold-hearted and manipulative bitch, you gotta dump her crippled ass on the side of the forest and leave her for dead. She’s only going to get you killed while she waltzes her lazy ass out of there for her own enrichment. This is the first and last film by writer Jared Butler and the second and last film written by Lars Norberg. I get the idea that one or both of these two dudes had a really bad breakup in high school or college.

All of the actors are fantastic in this movie, particularly John Cusack of course. Lynn really makes you despise her over the course of the film. Incidentally Cusack becomes far more understandable as the film progresses, given the dude just kinda wants his money back and Lynn is being the unreasonable asshole about it. At one point Miller tells Lynn “you really are a terrible person,” and he’s kinda right.

Blood Money is a good movie, it plays with the themes and concepts we’ve seen a billion times before just enough to make it interesting. John Cusack’s acting might throw some people off as he’s not quite like himself, but overall I thought this was worth the 89 minute runtime. It’s a good film at making you upset, but intentionally and toward the characters not the film itself.

Rating: B