L'énigme de la peur

I look forward to Natasha Henstridge in Lifetime or Hallmark movies - she makes it a bit more of an A list cast. She plays an FBI agent investigating a mass shooting who threatens to do it again unless he is paid some ransoms. Strangely they seem to want to negotiate with terrorists. Tom Everett Scott another better than Lifetime actor plays an expert on documents who can help find the criminals but has retired because of some traumatic incident involving his kid.

This is a better than usual Lifetime thriller especially since mass shootings are in the forefront of the news these days. Liked the ending - neat and feel good.

The story is based on a Jeffrey Deaver Novel. This detective mystery has Hallmark written all over it. It even has the same background noise ... oops music. It is machine made for the Proles. With standard dialog and standard predictable twists. You can tell it is TV and may even be a pilot for a series "Paper tells the tales."

Well, we have a mass killing at a train station. The person in charge of the killer named "Digger", said Digger will kill again if he does not get a good sum of money. Now where have we heard this one before. Wait for it here comes the twist the makes the movie.

The person that controls "the digger" meats with a traffic accident (yeh sure.) Now the only clue is a letter left telling where to make the drop-off. O. K. Do not get ahead of me. Only one person in the world can tell who the Digger is and what he is up to by analyzing the letter. That person is ex FBI and had problems with doing that sort of thing for them. Naturally a blond cutie FBI person pulls on his heart strings and gets him to do his thing.

Now we sit back and watch the thriller unfold.

This is a decent although unremarkable thriller in which the FBI recruits an ex-agent who is an expert in verifying and examining documents. He has a lot of personal issues including an ex-wife who wants the kids and a son who is still suffering the after-effects of being terrorized by a murderer he had put in prison several years before.

Although director Norma Bailey does a decent job in all departments and the actors handle their roles competently, the movie itself soon falls into fairly predictable patterns and scenes and the potentially interesting idea of showing how the analysis of documents and profiling of killers actually works is reduced to a few gadgets and flashes of insight. Instead we are distracted by family drama.

I cannot tell if the poverty in the script is due to Jeffrey Deaver's novel or to Ron Hutchinson's adaptation. I am not familiar with Mr. Deaver's works and the two other movies I have seen written by Mr. Hutchinson -- who also co-produced this TV-movie -- have not been very interesting, so I suspect it is not Mr. Deaver's responsibility. However, whoever is responsible, unless you are a fan of the genre, you can give this a miss.

Well, got to tell you why:

1) Their screenplays always with very bad dialog, making every character's speaking and talking a bit of unreal, like recited from memory, and everybody speaking with pure American English without any accent. Nobody got any background accent like everybody grew up in the same house, same school, same neighborhood, same area, same city and same State.

2) Horrible nonsensical sound track. The background music in every movie alwayssounded like the same. Lot of time the sound track started without anynecessity and stopped abruptly without any reason.

3) The funny thing is every role in the Lifetime movies is just so polite and sounds like well educated.

4) The female characters are always played by pretty women, you just can't find any ugly ones, even the young kids are pretty.

5) Very lame directing.

This movie is no exception. You might get brain tumor if you force yourself to keep watching it, just by listening to the pure American English without any accent by everybody would drive you nuts.

The strange thing is being a bad movie, with awful dialogue, with very predictable twist, it is not easy to admit than it is real bad. In my case, for the simpathy for Tom Everett Scott and for the nice subplot of custody. For fans, I suppose, it can be the perfect film. But, sure, an easy thriller/ policier can be a reasonable definition.