"There Will Be Blood" delivers on its promise and then some

Rating: 9/10 (10 January 2008)

We are promised that "There Will Blood" and there is in Paul Thomas Anderson's intense tale of oil man Daniel Plainview's (Daniel Day Lewis) war with the world. Plainview is a man in competition with himself and everybody around him. He drives his competitor's into the ground and makes no concessions to anybody . He is a complex, admirable (at times), fascinating character who possesses more than his fair share of humanity's worst excesses. Anderson pits his surly protagonist against a smart, young fundamentalist Christian who is on to his game but lacks Plainview's sociopathic ambition. The film's main character is the juice, but we're also rewarded with intense sequences involving much pain, lots of blood, and shocking, terribly convincing violence. Scenes featuring mining accidents resulting in injury or death are uncomfortable to behold. "There Will Be Blood" has the intensity of "Taxi Driver" and that film's riveting focus on one character. It is not a horror film in the narrow sense, but it trades in horror's base elements -- suspense, abnormal psychology, violence, greed, fear and blood. Several dozen pints of it. This is riveting stuff. But what do you expect from Ghoulardi Film Productions?