Troubled Waters

Jennifer Beals carries this movie through to acceptability, but everyone, including the character Beals portrays, has a wooden aura about them in this low budget mystery about a bunch of depraved, rich stiffs investigated by glum FBI stiffs. This movie may take the record for the having the most unlikable characters. Beals as well as her character manage to pull it off without much support. The far-fetched but still satisfying ending makes suffering through the clunky build-up barely worth it.

I started to not watch this movie based on the reviews but decided to give it a shot and was pleasantly surprised. Although the movie starts slow in the beginning it increasingly peaks your interest once the actually investigation begins. It has all the basic twists and turns as seen in thrillers and suspense movies. At first, it looks like a lower budgeted movie but once the dynamics of the characters come out, the movie is quite interested and keeps you on the edge of your seat playing detective yourself, and coming up with scenarios.

At first you wonder what the truth is behind the headaches of Jennifer Beals' character, then you are pleasantly surprised that she is not crazy but reluctantly to put her truth out there possible due to being judged and mocked. It's obvious throughout the movie, that although she is not well liked by her peers and is obviously and outcast, she does yield results in her cases (due to having an upper-hand). Awesome ending!!

...with bad acting, a bad script, a bad pace, and an awful movie.

Jennifer Beals, whom I have always liked, stars in Troubled Waters, a Canadian production. Beals plays Jennifer Beck, a police detective who says her lines like someone on Dragnet. She was involved in a shooting and still has bullet fragments in her head which give her headaches. Apparently the shooting also made her psychic, something she hides from her fellow officers.

When a little girl goes missing from her room, Beck and her partner, Andy (Jonathan Goad) a man with one of the thickest Canadian accents you'll ever hear, go to investigate. I want to say that despite the red herrings, I had this thing figured out in the first minute. And that's not because I'm a genius.

Beck starts getting all kinds of psychic visions, but frankly, I don't know what plot line was doing in there because it really didn't help he case all that much. Beck suspects adultery, and she has a villain for the kidnapping in mind. What she doesn't realize is that there is another crime that was supposed to be committed, and the kidnapping and the other crime are confounding the investigation and who the suspects are.

At one hour and 45 minutes, this movie felt longer than Gone with the Wind and Howard's End combined. The dialog was awful. The initial scene between the husband and wife was one of those "I know we've been having a hard time because I've been busy but I'm going to make it up to you" scenes that I've seen 50,000 times - in each case done better. Totally by the numbers. Jennifer Beals was required to say "I'm fine" about 100 times during the film as she grabbed for aspirin to take care of her headache that she said she didn't have. As Beck, she exhibited no personality trait except a quiet surliness throughout. Sharon Lewis played another detective who was constantly telling Beck's partner how Beck is a bad detective. There was no reason for this character, and her acting was abominable.

The denouement was no surprise to me at all. Structured better, directed with more pace, stronger acting, and someone redoing of the script, as derivative as "Troubled Waters" is, it still could have been very good. Instead, it was lousy.

One final thing. When the girl's father went to New York for a conference, by the way, it looked as much like New York as Alma, Nebraska does.

In general, viewers enjoy watching police movies when they are synchronized with the police's struggles and fine deductions. However, Agent Beck's psychics represents all answers out of the blue, with no significant police works made. I felt like I was skimming a mystery book from the back. You will see a twist in the last 10 minutes, but it was cheesy and frustrating with little content related with the entire story. In short, a terrible unstructured script.

I watched this via Amazon Prime and within 15 minutes was saying to myself, "This seems like a Lifetime movie." Well, doh, of course that's exactly what it is - lousy plot, mediocre writing and barely adequate acting. Why are these Canadian productions frequently so blah? Since The L Word, has Jennifer Beales had any role that suited her? She deserves better.