‘He Bled Neon’ Review: Joe Cole and Rita Ora in Clichéd Crime Story

The director Drew Kirsch got his start in music videos, perhaps most notably as the mastermind (or, something mind) behind Taylor Swift’s celebrity-filled “You Need to Calm Down” video. But like David Fincher and plenty of others before him, Kirsch had his sights on leaving the short-form, for-hire market and making a feature film of his own. He’s done just that with He Bled Neon, which premiered at SXSW. 

Kirsch is to be commended for making a leap that few ever do. And his debut feature certainly has a lot of tailoring, with its propulsive music, saturated color, and picturesquely grimy locations — New Mexico stands in for the seedier corners of Las Vegas sprawl. Kirsch is also smart enough to maintain a modest scale: He Bled Neon is a small revenge movie, economical in its reach. This isn’t an auteur project; Kirsch directs a script by Tim Cairo and Jake Gibson, said to be loosely based on the childhood experiences of producer Nate Bolotin. So Kirsch has not sought to make some grand autobiographical introduction, a bold and solipsistic announcement of his artistic worldview. We ought to respect that humility. 

And, perhaps, bear some of that good will in mind as we actually watch He Bled Neon, an excruciatingly dumb movie Frankensteined together from a host of influences, which may include Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Winding Refn, Harmony Korine and even (shudder) Sam Levinson. The film’s attempt at neo-noir grit has the same effect as seeing private school kids flashing gang signs. It’s all obnoxious posing, never once convincing us of the logic that governs its own internal world or its supposed, lived-experience relationship to reality. So it succeeds as neither high-style criminal fantasy nor hard-boiled vérité. 

Joe Cole, late of Peaky Blinders, plays Ethan, a former petty teen gangster from Las Vegas who has decamped to Los Angeles and made an honest man of himself. He’s got a flourishing, lucrative career in real estate and is engaged to be married. But just when he thought he was out, the Vegas underbelly pulls him back in. His older brother, played by Paul Wesley, has died under mysterious circumstances, forcing Ethan to return home to contend with that grief, with the stark fact of his senile mother, and with the resentments of former friends who view his departure as a betrayal. Before long, Ethan is scrapping it up with whoever he can on a quest to get justice for his family. 

He Bled Neon is an effort to map out an intriguingly interconnected web of low-life dealers and mid-level crime bosses, but every encounter Ethan has along his bloody journey is a repeat of the one before it. It’s not worth trying to get one’s bearings in any given scene, because Kirsch will just stage the same fight anyway and reveal nothing of interest about the plot. There is some kinetic energy to Kirsch’s blocking and shot choices, but one grows tired of the house style rather quickly. 

The film’s attempts at homecoming drama are worse than its action sequences, all cliché-drenched tough talk about the dreadful undertow of life on Ethan’s old streets. It’s not credible coming out of Cole’s mouth, nor former NFL-er Marshawn Lynch’s, nor Rings of Power actor Ismael Cruz Córdova’s, nor pop star Rita Ora’s.

Though, I must say that Ora does have some real screen presence; among the ragtag crew of He Bled Neon, she pops the most. Maybe it’s just the halo of her real-world fame bleeding in from the edges of the film, but it nonetheless gives the picture some much needed shine. The other three are just fine — I would love to see Lynch do another actual comedy, though, rather than trudging through the awful comic-relief duty imposed upon him here — and any inauthenticity they project is mostly the fault of the people behind the camera.

I don’t blame a first-time feature director for wanting to start the next phase of his career in this particular mode. Cool crime movies can sometimes connect with audiences and make a little money, and they provide a decent enough creative sandbox to play in, much like horror does. But there’s so little that’s unique here that I wonder if Kirsch maybe should have held out for a project that spoke to him a bit more. In He Bled Neon, the ersatz A24-ish motions are gone through and that’s about it, a limp endeavor to do something with a soggy, banal script. If you’re going to give your movie that title, its gunk and viscera really better glow.