A veteran FBI profiler, Terry McCaleb (Clint Eastwood) is unrelenting in his pursuit of justice and unequalled in his success at tracking and catching murderers. But as he closes in on his latest adversary - a psychopath dubbed "The Code Killer" by the media - McCaleb is felled by a massive heart attack and forced into early retirement.

Two years later, a woman (Wanda De Jesus) reveals a secret that compels McCaleb to re-examine his recovery: his life was saved by someone else's death - the victim of a murder that remains unsolved. Against the advice of his cardiologist (Anjelica Huston) and with the help of his neighbor (Jeff Daniels), McCaleb literally puts his life on the line to track down a murderer who has forced him to take this case personally.

Just as McCaleb suffers from an ailing heart, the movie also has a bum ticker in the form of Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential)'s screenplay. It is filled with stale dialogue, a lack of logic, thin characters, unsurprising twists and turns and bits of humor that borders on being racist. Eastwood's directing, usually quite solid, goes right in line with the blandness of the script. There's little energy to it, no buildup of dramatic tension and the payoff is far from satisfying. Clint the director is on autopilot here, trying to get it done with as quickly as possible.

The acting fares a little bit better, but not by much. Eastwood's performance as McCaleb is okay but nothing special. Huston walks around angry most of the time (likely due to the dialogue she's given to work with), DeJesus is decent but hardly memorable and Paul Rodriguez, the poor man's Erik Estrada, is grating from start to finish as a cop at odds with McCaleb. Only Jeff Daniels' performance shows any real signs of life. Too bad he couldn't infuse the rest of the film with his energy.

I've always been a big fan of Eastwood's work, both in front and behind the camera. The past decade has seen Clint branch off into new and exciting, more mature directions with such diverse films as Unforgiven, The Bridges Of Madison County and White Hunter, Black Heart. Blood Work had the potential to be a film that could have combined that new level maturity with the gritty police thrillers that populated his career in the 1970s and 80s in such great films like Dirty Harry and Tightrope.

Unfortunately, the screenplay got in the way.

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