Implicated

Nowadays, they say, audiences don't follow the actors when they choose films. Back in the old days, if you liked someone, you saw everything they did. I'm afraid I'm in that category, and it gets me into trouble.

I have always liked Billy McNamara. Okay, he's cute. But he did good work in "Copycat" and for some reason it wasn't followed up. I believe he had some personal challenges, as I recall, and lost that momentum.

Here he is in some low-budget dreck, "Implicated," and he's not entirely successful. The cast is good: Amy Locane, Frederic Forrest, and Priscilla Barnes (unrecognizable).

The plot concerns a kidnapping plot of a little girl which is devised by the father and his friend Tom (McNamara). Tom is engaged to Ann (Locane) who loves the little girl and is great with her. Meanwhile, her mother is an addict and doped up most of the time.

Slowly Ann realizes that there's more to this plot than she knew - she thought she was just babysitting. She didn't realize it was supposed to be a kidnapping with a demand for ransom, and that the father was in on it. And the affable, romantic Tom has a dark side. Real dark and real mean.

Someone said Roger Clinton was the best one in the cast and that "you couldn't tell he was acting." That's because he wasn't. I saw that name in the credits and knew this movie was going to be a mistake.

Actually, I loved the ending, and it redeemed the film for me. The acting for the most part was very uneven, especially from the boyish McNamara. Not a terrible rental.

Roger Clinton steals this film as a head-shaking Sheriff who stands around a lot at crime scenes and lets everybody else do the figuring out and stuff. Roger is from the Naturalistic school of acting in that you really can't tell he's acting.

Actually, this is typical HBO Filler that's mostly Amateur Hour, but earns some style points and is at least a couple notches above say, Fred Olen Ray. It does generate some suspense, mostly due to another one of William McNamara's intense turns as a full blown psycho. Boyishly handsome in a Montgomery Clift way, there's still something fishy and warped about him that directors seem to like to capitalize on. You also have to sort of admire the way this film so doggedly tries to work out its tired plot.

Speaking of tired, poor Frederick Forrest. He looks exhausted, and of course, quite embarrassed. Priscilla Barnes appears as a drug addicted floozy, and she's really become a pretty gutsy actress as she's aged and her looks have faded. The little girl who is kidnapped is quite poor, however, and because she seems so curiously unmoved and unaffected by all the violence and strangeness going on around her, much of the drama is drained away. Amy Locane, as McNamara's innocent girlfriend, has a good rapport with the girl, but isn't able to convey the complexities of emotion her role demands.

The plot depends on major implausabilities and absurd coincidences, but in all fairness, no more so than many bigger budgeted action flics. There's reason to believe the director could go on and make a halfway decent film in the future.

Finally, this film could also be seen as an unconventional tutorial for single parents looking for a way to circumnavigate the adoption system.

Didn't see this one when it first came out, but I was impressed with the film making on what must have been a shoestring budget. Acting was inconsistent, but overall, a very worthy effort.

This movie has a pretty good plot idea, a fake kidnapping similar to Fargo, but the rest is poor. The acting is overacting half the time and very thin, forced and phoney half the time, even from Amy, not even equal to a decent TV network movie. The cops on the side actually do a better job of acting. A better suspense yarn on the rental shelves would be Best Laid Plans. The IMDB vote rating of 3.x is right on. Some of those voters should have posted reviews too :-) -Bob

'Implicated' is the story of a planned kidnapping gone terribly wrong for the assailant. Two men plot to defraud one of the men's wife out of her trust fund by pretending to posing as her daughter's kidnappers. But thanks to a distrusting and viciously greedy wife, the plan is foiled. One is killed and the other tries to go ahead with the plan, even implicating his girlfriend in the mess, and threatens to kill her if she doesn't comply.

What might have been an interesting story, and particularly by the end when it takes on the cloak of a full-on action movie with explosions and such, if only briefly, it was terribly marred by poor acting. Much of it being unrealistic dialog from, surprisingly, William McNamara as one of the main characters, Tom Baker. Granted, he's supposed to be crazy and shows it more and more as the movie goes along, but he sounds almost as if he has his script in hand in each scene and reads it very quickly with unusual pauses and such. There were also the more corny moments between Amy Locane who plays Anne, the rather stupid girlfriend, and Kare Keough (Katie), the kidnapped girl. Richard Tyson didn't seem particularly convincing either as one of the kidnappers. Oh, and don't forget to cue the gratuitous sex scene to reignite viewer's flailing interests.

The film might've been more entertaining were it not for such poor acting.