THE CLUMSY WAR CRISIS: Jolie’s Directional Disaster
The Hollywood elite are nervously shifting in their seats as brutal reviews drop for Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial effort, Without Blood, starring her close friend, billionaire’s wife Salma Hayek. The film, a “two-hander” focusing on a lengthy conversation between two people whose violent pasts are intertwined, is being savaged by critics who call it a “clumsy war two-hander” that is “dramatically inert” and “fails to garner much purchase” on screen.
TMZ is exposing the artistic failure! Jolie, whose past films examined specific conflicts, chose to tell a deliberately “unidentified military campaign” story, a vagueness that critics claim makes the film feel “constantly confused” and “fundamentally imitative.” Jolie’s “honest drive” to confront injustice is praised, but critics argue that her “disarming earnestness can’t compensate for a film’s lack of dramatic shape.” The consensus: good intentions paved the road to mediocrity.
THE HAYEK HIJACK: Stranded In A Vanity Project
The biggest fallout from this disaster falls squarely on Salma Hayek Pinault. As the older Nina, a woman who survived a horrific family murder, Hayek is stranded in a film whose structure “never gains sufficient conversational momentum.” Critics note that while both Hayek and co-star Demián Bichir can hold an audience’s attention through “body language alone,” the generalized themes and constant, “visually underwhelming” flashbacks render their performances “formless.”
Hayek’s powerful commitment to the role is undermined by the film’s flaws, making this feel like a classic celebrity vanity project where personal passion superseded artistic clarity. The scenes, where Hayek’s “small performance gestures… like the ashing of a cigarette or stirring a cup of tea” are supposed to be deep triggers, are instead seen as “ham-fisted stabs” at emotion. This is Hayek’s first major artistic flop under the intense scrutiny of her life as the wife of the Kering CEO.
THE WEINSTEIN PARALLELS: Revenge Versus Justice
The film’s exploration of revenge and justice—Nina confronts the man who murdered her family years prior—carries a disturbing, unacknowledged parallel to Hayek’s own life. Hayek is a prominent survivor of abuse by Harvey Weinstein.
While the film attempts to explore “universal truths about war, trauma, memory, and healing,” its descent into “war is bad territory” and its “trite emotional climax” fail to deliver the potency expected from a high-profile drama. Critics note the film’s failure to provide “political, regional, or philosophical specifics,” creating a generalized, predictable conversation that ultimately makes the film’s “irrelevance becomes impossible to ignore.”
THE BRANGELINA SHADOW: The By The Sea Flop Echo
Jolie’s filmography is marked by examining global conflict, but one notable outlier was the romantic drama By the Sea, which starred her and then-husband Brad Pitt, and was widely considered a notorious flop. Critics are already drawing uncomfortable comparisons to that disastrous project.
While Without Blood explores trauma external to the home, its dramatic inertia and heavy-handed imagery echo the problems of By the Sea. It proves that Jolie’s sincerity and commitment to human rights does not automatically translate into a successful film. The film is described as sort of resembling a “less-assured ‘My Dinner With Andre’ if it were about war crimes.”
THE FINANCIAL FICTION: The Gambling Daughter
The plot itself contains a shocking, disturbing detail that Hayek chose to portray: Nina, after being orphaned, is “adopted by a creepy chemist” who eventually gambles her away in a card game to an equally creepy count who marries her at .
This inclusion of such a graphic and sordid detail in a film being promoted by two of Hollywood’s biggest stars is a massive risk. It shows the actresses were willing to dive into darkness, but their “insistent performances clumsily posing as subtle and mature” were not enough to save the film from its structural flaws.
THE CLIFFHANGER: What Did Hayek Say Privately?
Without Blood has been dismissed as a noble failure, a “road to mediocrity paved with good intentions,” despite the intense personal investment by both Hayek and Jolie.
The final question is: Did Salma Hayek know the film was a “clumsy” mess while they were shooting it in Italy? Did she ever express her concerns privately to her friend, the director Angelina Jolie, that the material’s vagueness would cause a critical disaster? We are betting the suppressed on-set emails would reveal a level of chaos and creative doubt that the stars are desperately trying to hide.
