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‘Cold Wallet’ Review: Engrossing Thriller About Trio Seeking Repayment for a Cryptocurrency Fraud Scheme
Director Cutter Hodierne steadily ratches up the suspense while offering only sporadic moments of comic relief.
We’re introduced to Billy (Raúl Castillo), an underemployed screw-up, while he loudly proclaims to other customers in a Berkshires karaoke bar that he’s been “following crypto since that Game Stop thing,” and brags that his investment in a currency called Tulip is going nowhere but up. Dom (Tony Cavalero), his best buddy, martial arts instructor and fellow Tulip victim, is in a comparably shaky situation — he had planned to use his crypto profits to establish his own dojo — but his pacifist philosophy tempers his rage. Hodierne, working from a screenplay he co-wrote with John Hibey, leavens the suspense with dollops of jet-black comedy, especially when the trio visits a gun store to purchase weaponry, and encounter a perky clerk who’s eager to sell them “the same [type of] gun that John Wick uses.” (She also pitches another type of firearm to Eva: “The Beretta is on sale if you sign up for our rewards program.”) Later, after they have somehow managed to break into Hegel’s mansion, the unarmed Dom’s repeated reluctance to do Hegel bodily harm (even while interrogating the hoaxer) becomes a running gag that quite possibly could have a fatal payoff.
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