Troubled Waters

A little girl was taken from her room. The kidnapping has revealed a few other secrets about this model family. The mother's elicit affair, some mysteriously missing characters from their past, and a family friend who seems too close for comfort. I found this movie very poorly acted; this was accentuated by the poor dialog. The film also had quite a few scattered subplots and characters. Special Agent Beck, who was leading the FBI in solving the case was involved in an accident that gave her second sight. This 'ability' did not add anything to the plot - it would've made it more exciting if they had actually figured things out naturally, as Agents do. To me, it was just a weak way of solving a mystery. There also were some character who didn't add anything to the direction of the movie. They weren't antagonist, nor did they really help any of the situations. Despite all this, I had to watch the film till the end. Perhaps Im just a sucker for cheap thrillers, but in either case, it was an easy and forgettable guilty pleasure.

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.

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!!

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.

...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.