Kidnykid's Full Review: Michael Connelly - Blood Work
The plot of BLOOD WORK can be summarized very easily. Clint Eastwood plays a former FBI profiler forced to retire after a heart attack suffered on the job while looking for a killer who has taunted him for ages. He spends two years waiting for a donor, and then - voila! - manages to nab his donor's murderer once he gets his heart transplant.
Granted, it doesn't help matters any that I have been transplanted for over twenty years, but that subplot alone provided me with enough holes to drive an entire fleet of Mack trucks through.
For starters, nobody uses mercury thermometers anymore. They were standard issue when I got mine - my transplant center provided me with one because I was expected to measure my temperature in centigrade, and Centigrade thermometers were not available at the local drugstore in 1979 - but Eastwood should have been forced to use a digital. I haven't seen an old-fashioned thermometer on the shelves in I don't know how long. (Yes, I was expected to measure my temperature as often as Eastwood's character. Fever is a symptom of both rejection and infection, because the body reacts exactly the same to both a germ and a transplanted organ. Therefore, it would have been a surprise if Eastwood hadn't been expected to take his temp every four hours during the movie.)
Secondly, how on God's green earth did Eastwood get a hold of those anesthesia charts? Many transplant centers create charts specifically for use by patients. My center custom-tailored these charts to each patient, specifically in order to assist us in charting our own individualized temperature and medication regimens. What Eastwood's character used is more typically used by anesthesiologists to chart the vital signs of patients undergoing surgery while under one form or another of anesthesia, and would likely not even be possessed by a cardiologist (who is generally not likely to perform surgery as laypeople understand the term).
Thirdly, Anjelica Huston's character, the cardiologist, shouldn't have been threatening to dump Eastwood's as a patient. That's highly illegal, from what I understand - it's called patient abandonment, and Eastwood's character could have nailed her for it in a court of law. (In fact, threatening someone with a "patient abandonment" charge is a not-uncommon oral threat lodged against some nurses if they are unwilling to work double shifts. All a nursing supervisor has to do is threaten a nurse with patient abandonment charges to get him or her to work that extra eight hours. That's how potent the concept is in medicine.)
Finally, what's Eastwood's character doing messing around with Graciela (Wanda de Jesus) right after an apparent rejection episode? I've been through them - with fevers as high as his (over 101 degrees Fahrenheit) - and trust me, you feel like you've had the flu for weeks after a rejection episode with a fever that bad. Sex is the last thing on your mind, generally. That was true of me.
There were also jokes and small things that only transplant patients would get. There were almost-throwaway references to Eastwood's character liking things Mexican (Graciela and her sister, the Eastwood character's donor, were Mexican), which is a by-now-old urban legend about how recipients somehow get the characteristics of their donors. And only someone who is familiar with modern transplant drugs would understand why Eastwood washed the meds down with orange juice. (Even that's a nit - he's washing pills down with OJ, rather than suspending the liquid version of one transplant drug in the OJ first and then swallowing the mix. He should have been on the liquid-suspension form of that drug if the reference to the use of orange juice is to "work" for those familiar with transplant medication regimens.)
Eastwood's character also made a reference to shaving three times a day, in response to a remark on the cardiologist's part about reducing his prednisone usage. Granted, I had some pretty gross-looking hair myself after megadoses of prednisone, but this drug doesn't have nearly the reputation for excessive hair growth that some other transplant drugs do - the same ones you take the liquid-suspension form of in orange juice. (The hair growth resulting from these drugs has often been referred to in terms of Brooke Shields' eyebrows. That's because everyplace that has hair, the eyebrows included, is likely to overgrow hair by a factor of infinity when a recipient has to take certain transplant drugs, and prednisone doesn't have a reputation as being one of those "excessive hair growth" drugs, although it causes its share of problems.)
Lest you think I'm spending too much time on the transplant stuff, keep in mind that the transplant is a crucial plot point - if it weren't for the transplant, the main character would have no reason to hunt down the donor's murderer. He'd have no reason to hook up with Graciela, either.
For me, because of all the technical problems I observed, I'm really hesitant to recommend BLOOD WORK. I know a lot of the audience had trouble watching the heart-biopsy scenes during my show, as well, so there's the gross-out factor to consider in my advice as well. Who wants to go to what purports to be an action flick and get nauseated by overly-explicit medical scenes?
March 1998 In Blood Work, New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly departs from his crime novels featuring LAPD Harry Bosch and introduces T...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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