Bryan Cranston: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

3. Topo - Cold Comes The Night (2013)

Very much a film only for Bryan Cranston completists, Cold Comes The Night matches a not-bad premise of a blind career criminal using a young woman as his eyes in his attempt to regain a cash package from a crooked cop with sloppy execution, lazy writing and an accent from Cranston that is almost worthy of Dick Van Dyke. As Polish criminal Topo, Cranston's physical performance is horribly undermined by his accent and by the film's almost wilful ignorance of the potential to get out of bottom gear. You expect some thrills, especially with Walter White looming ominously over Topo, but it never comes, and instead the film sways from being preposterous, usually in the set pieces, to being unforgivably bland with a maternal girl power subplot that feels like the director wrongly thought he was on to a winner post-Taken. It all descends into unpleasant farce, and everyone other than Alice Eve - the good-hearted Madame who unwittingly ends up playing the guide dog role - ends up getting sold out by the poor script in order to facilitate a sugary hero ending for her.