Unfamiliar with the cast, they were all terrific. Really good movie... Finally found one

This one is better than I guessed it would be. Sean Bean makes a great Louisiana crime lord - southern accent and all! :) 8.5/10

Hannah Lee Baker (Abigail Breslin) is an orphan who lives with her meth head uncle Donny (Lew Temple) and flirty sister Amber (Alexa PenaVega). Meth manufacturing and dealing is the family business run by Uncle Frank (Sean Bean) a strip club owner. Hannah likes to play chess with Billy who was once state champion. She recites poetic metaphors about chess pieces and how they relate to her life. Frank is the powerful King who has people in his way killed. Hannah forces her way into the business as a delivery person, but inadvertently cause problems between Frank and the biker customers when she cuts the meth with vitamin D. At some point in time, Hannah must choose between family and getting out. The supporting cast was great. Abigail Breslin was not convincing in the lead role. The chess metaphor was a flop. The poetic readings were simply horrible. A fair action/drama/thriller rental. Parental Guide: F-bomb, nudity (Claire Frederiksen)

Too often Hollywood tries to make hay from the stupidity of youth. Usually this is a problem for believability, as teenagers aren't really as immature as Hollywood contends, or we'd all be swimming in a world of vandalism and graffiti. The other error Hollywood often makes, indeed, film makers worldwide often make, is to cast older actors for younger roles. Wicked Blood (Bad Blood on my dvd) makes both these mistakes. Don't get me wrong, this is still a high stakes and interesting movie. The lead looks fifteen. What the movie really needed was a girl whom looked 10. Then all the confusion, all the massive bad judgements, all the extreme disregard for consequences, all the fantasy about a new family, and all the quaint references to chess as a game of reality would have made perfect sense. This would have been a far more powerful movie if that had been the case. That's my gripe, and I hope others disagree, because everything else about Wicked Blood is highly professional and entertaining, with great characters, well cast and played. It has an engaging story, not an Oscar for originality, but at least an unusual perspective. The film techniques, soundtrack and wonderful performances make sure it never dips into anything cliche, mundane or boring. This is solid Southern drama with streaks of both violence and conscience, and well worth a look.

i'm wondering why people..quite a few actually reviewed the movie and enjoyed it and wound up giving it 4's and 5's. imo its a solid 6 movie. it was totally engrossing to me. Abby Breslin was the main lead and she did a wonderful job...everybody else were good or better. yes...its not believable that a girl would run packages of hillbilly crack for her uncle at only 10 dollars a trip, that was the only unbelievable thing to me. if you are a fan of either...Breslin...Bean or Purefoy, watch this movie, both male leads get plenty of screen time too. hey...its a good watch if one doesn't fall asleep through the movie..i totally enjoyed the movie.

I watched this film simply on the recommendation of a dear friend who knows I have a thing for elements of chess in a movie, either as supporting theme or a cameo, or as the centerpiece, if you will. The script was good, and delivered and filmed well enough, though a bit too simplistic for me and I felt I knew where the story was going too easily. It felt like a diet movie. I wasn't about to gain any mental weight trying to decipher plot twists or subtle character alleys. That's not harsh, it's just how I saw it. Most of my attention was on the analogy of chess pieces to the unfolding plot of teenage girl against the wickedness all about her. In her own family! For the life of me, I spent the better part of the credits going back and forth trying to find the source of the chess "poem," but never got anything definitive other than the script. And don't think you're going to SEE a lot of strategic chess scenes. You have to listen to the poem interwoven throughout for the saving grace. I found the cinematography crisp, and enjoyed the opening landscapes with a darker tie-in further into the movie. The music was good, and per the credits, mostly original too!

The cast is not bad, the direction's not bad, the story mediocre at best. On the whole, this movie is a pale imitation of the 1994 film 'Fresh': http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109842/ Though of course there are many differences. The original was set in an inner city ghetto, and involved a mostly Black cast (including Samuel L. Jackson, among others.) This one is set in the hillbilly rural South, and involves a very nearly all-White cast. The original protagonist was a boy; here the protagonist is a girl. However, both movies/plots involve drugs gangs, life circumstances of hopeless, abject despair, and a chess-minded wunderkind emerging against all odds in such a setting, then plotting and manipulating to extricate themselves and their loved ones from the deadly morass, culminating in a violent denouement with numerous "chess pieces" sacrificed along the way. Yet in my opinion, the original was vastly better in every respect. It had a more nuanced and intelligent plot, deeper character development, fantastic acting, and overall a more realistic setup and more believable motivation. It was bold, poignant, in some ways ground-breaking and in some heart-breaking. It was in fact 'fresh' -- both in concept and by virtue of being the original. And despite its age, it is -- unfortunately -- still as urgently topical in 2014 as it was back in 1994. To anyone contemplating 'Wicked Blood', I would strongly recommend 'Fresh' instead.

02/13/2019 It's hard to believe that a little kid like Abigail Breslin can carry an entire movie, just as she's done in so many movies but again, she does. Everybody else are just supporting actors and actresses. For the most part, she does a really good job in this movie but her finite skills as an actress need work. By the time she turns 30 with a little luck, she should be on top of the Hollywood heap. A fun little movie to watch and not a bad storyline either. I definitely recommend this movie. NOTE: Kinda sad to see cute little smiling actor kids, especially cute little girls grow up and turn into what the many turn into (not-so-cute-big-heads). I guess that's life? Bon Appetit

"Lose not the Queen, for ten to one... if she be lost, the game is gone." "Wicked Blood" is a standard mafia movie, but then on a smaller scale. The story of the teenage girl Hannah (Abigail Breslin) who's being taken care of, after the loss of her parents, by her uncle Donny (Lew Temple), which has the appearance of Dr. Emmett Brown from "Back to the Future" but with too much "hillbilly crack" in his system. And then there's also Uncle Frank (Sean Bean). Frank is the local bad guy and head of a mini gang of mobsters. Besides running a striptease tent he has also a lucrative business as manufacturer and supplier of crack. The one who assists him throughout the film is his somewhat crazy, retarded younger brother Bobby (Jake Busey),. Apparently Bobby became slower after Hannah's mother bashed his head with a baseball bat. Hannah is a passionate chess player (something she probably inherited from Donny who once was State Champion), and she applies the rules of this game in her daily life. Thoughtful and with reason she performs every next move. Eventually, she devises a sophisticated plan to escape from this violent, drug-related world. Throw in an undercover agent, an assault on Hannah's sister and the final revenge, and you have a complete picture of this standard crime film. A film with a story like there are already a thousand made of. And yet it's not an unpleasant film. And that's thanks to Abigail Breslin who manages to give shape to the character Hannah in a natural and wonderful way. She reminded me of Saoirse Ronan repeatedly. She also has that innocent look, that determination and the all-pervading calmness. Maybe Ronan outclasses her a bit but only with a small lead. Despite the fact that the whole story is a bit exaggerated, improbable at times and thinking about it after wards sometimes pretty laughable, the acting of Abigail Breslin was very convincing and plausible. A small, young girl only skilled in chess who goes to battle against a bunch of ruthless drug gangsters, who are not shy to liquidate someone who complains to much, is something that only could happen to Nancy Drew. The one I enjoyed the most, was Lew Temple as the crazy, drug addicted low-life Donny. The chess games with Hannah briefly hinted a different picture of him though. That of a reasonably intelligent man who, because of past events and the current situation he is experiencing, recreated the individual as we see it now. The moments when he takes a shot (probably to check the quality) and starts to thrash about, accompanied by loud rock music, I found grandiose. Sean Bean (Who I've recently saw in CleanSkin) looks like Boromir teleported into modern times. The same faraway look and stoic calmness he constantly shows. I expected him declaring a sentence like "One does not simply ... steal my drugs" any moment. Despite the mediocre storyline and some irritating (The city where it all takes place is apparently so deserted and desolate as a ghost town along Route 66. Totally no inhabitants to detect) and hilarious (The FBI infiltrating such a crappy,small gang.) moments, it's still a movie you continue to watch. And that is merely due to the solid commitment of the actors and actresses. More reviews at http://opinion-as-a-moviefreak.blogspot.be/

...pretender to the throne of films like "Winter's Bone," this predictable thriller from writer/director Mark "The Killing Jar" Young and his regular cinematography collaborator Gregg "Ditto" Easterbrook isn't a terrible watch, but it's a dispensable one. The cast does well enough with their roles (although Sean "LotR" Bean seems a bit bored with it all), Easterbrook's DP work is at times quite beautiful, and I'm not really faulting Young's direction. Nonetheless, nothing really quite jells; I couldn't manage to buy into this world of backwoods meth labs and a pretty little thing who would settle for ten bucks a pop to be a drug mule. If you're a fan of any of the actors, I suppose it's not going to embarrass any of them too much, but this is one of those films that you're going to forget almost as soon as you've finished viewing it.