Is it a bad sign when you laugh during the trailer for an action thriller?

Yep.

Devoid of anything resembling a personality and bland enough to give anyone looking for the upcoming Superman reboot a cause for concern, The Cold Light of Day is so inept in both production values and dialogue that it makes even Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids 4-D seem like a complete and utter masterpiece.

Cavill plays Will Shaw, who travels to Spain to vacation with his family and discovers that his father (Bruce Willis) is a CIA agent whose dealings with Israel may or may not be questionable but have most certainly put the lives of Will and his family in danger. The rest of the film involves Shaw attempting to write wrongs and rescue his family.

Or something like that.

If this is an example of what we can expect from Cavill in the upcoming Man of Steel, it might be time to reconsider and see if Brandon Routh is still available. In what should be a sympathetic and intriguing role, Cavill is almost stunningly and awkwardly bland elicits more giggles than he does sympathy as the young man who is supposed to appear as an "everyman" but comes off more as a ripped model with six-pack abs appearing in a college acting workshop.

It's difficult to imagine what either Bruce Willis or Sigourney Weaver saw in this script, a script with hokey dialogue and paper-thin characters that is stripped bare of anything resembling suspense or creativity. Even the film's action sequences come off as anti-climactic, though this is as much because of the forced and laughably bad dialogue as it is any particular weakness within the action.

I suppose the best thing to be said about The Cold Light of Day is that Taylor Kitsch is nowhere to be found.

© Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic