Columbo: Grand Deceptions

Colonel Frank Brailie has been stealing money from a foundation fund and enjoying the benefits of it for years until Sergeant Major Lester Keegan finds out and decides he wants his cut in return for silence. The two men work together at a private military training academy that takes citizens and makes them into soldiers. Not wanting to give up his income, Brailie uses a party for General Padget and the setting up of a gift as an alibi while he slips out to find Keegan on night manoeuvres with his unit. He stabs Keegan unseen and then leaves his body on one of many explosive packs set to simulate mortar attacks. The next day he is called to the scene of the "accident" to find that Lieutenant Columbo is there with this men. It all seems "open & shut" until Columbo finds a flashlight and a reason to doubt the accident.

As with many TV film series (such as Perry Mason), if you like one or two of them then you'll pretty much like them all. This entry in the Columbo series pretty much follows the usual formula – we know the killer and the "perfect" plan but then watch Columbo follow his hunch and gradually starts to pick holes in the story he is told before eventually finding enough to prove his suspicions. Knowing this ahead of time won't ruin anything for you; it is simply what happens in all the films. With this strict adherence to formula it is usually down to several factors whether or not the Columbo film stands out or if it is just average. Having had my fingers burnt with my first "new" Columbo, I wasn't sure if I should bother going back or should just rewatch the original series from the seventies, but I thought that the formula can't be that hard to pull off and figured that it was worth another pass. Sadly this film continues the trend of just not being as roundly enjoyable as it did in its heyday. The story is OK but it is the delivery where it falls down. We spend too long on the build up and too long on the characters rather than focusing on Columbo. The mood of the originals used to be quite bright and fun but here it is drab and serious – making it harder to enjoy while being too stiff to enjoy as a drama. The mystery unfolds in a quite uninvolving fashion and I didn't get into it that well.

The delivery problems continue with the characters and the performances. Falk isn't himself and he seems less comfortable in his character than before – a very strange thing considering I'm used to seeing him be so natural. It isn't his fault though that he is almost sidelined by the other characters and I did wonder why the film spent so much time away from him. Foxworth is too dull to interact with Columbo well and he is far from being a good foil for Falk if you use the standard set by the first few series. Romano is OK in a minor role but while the performances from Elliott and Eilber are OK, they don't deserve the focus they are given.

Overall an average Columbo film at best. The idea is OK but the delivery is roundly poor. The cast are poor, the story uninspiring, the music twee and silly all producing a modern film that doesn't deserve to really share the same character as the originals and will barely do enough to please even fans.

Man, what is it with 1989 Columbo movies? Perhaps it was because of the fact that the 1989 Columbo movies were the first ones to be made after an 11 year 'break' and they were still searching for the right out formula with some new 'modern' additions to it. But fact is that 1989 aren't really among the best Columbo movies, with some exceptions here and there though.

This one really isn't the most exciting or interesting Columbo movie to watch. Despite that the movie is set at a private civilian military think tank base, rarely ever something exciting is happening. The movie is progressing very slowly and some of the sequences are needlessly long and progressing in a lacking pace, without making enough contribution to the movie and its story. Columbo is hardly investigating anything and all he does is walking around, bugging all kinds of people. Everything he discovers and hears happened by chance and not necessarily always because of his investigation skills and tactics. Even though the movie features all of the usual Columbo movie ingredients it doesn't feel like an average Columbo movie because it just doesn't all get handled too well. This was Sam Wanamaker's last movie he directed during his career. He also directed the previous Columbo movie "Columbo: The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case", from 1977.

It's a sort of an unwritten rule for a Columbo movie that whenever Lt. Columbo himself shows up rather late into the story, the movie normally isn't going to be among the best the series has to offer. This is also the case with "Columbo: Grand Deceptions", in which Lt. Columbo shows up after about 20 minutes.

The movie also isn't helped much by its characters. Military characters are though ones to play as an actor, since they are all so very stereotypical. Only some really fine and talented actors can pull it off to make their characters still work out. This movie just doesn't feature any of these kind of actors unfortunately. Most later Columbo movies made the mistake not to cast some big well known and already established names in it. The movie is filled with some big unknowns who never really had a flourishing career, before or after this movie and for a good reason. Most actors play their roles well enough but it just isn't helping the movie to still make something special out of it all. There isn't really a good strong character opposite Lt. Columbo for this movie and some of the characters also makes a totally redundant impression, as do some of the plot-lines.

Besides, normally it's obvious from the beginning what the reasons and motivations for the killer were to come to his actions. In this movie however new things are getting revealed as the movie progresses. At times the movie even seems to forget that its a murder-mystery.

No, all in all the movie is not that horrible and it certainly also isn't the worst Columbo movie ever made but it however also is one of the least interesting Columbo movie entries to watch.

6/10

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Columbo always likes to get his man or woman. This time, it's Robert Foxworth who plays a military man. Sam Wanamaker better known and respected for his role in rebuilding the Shakespeare Globe Theater on the Thames in London, England returns to direct a Columbo. He is a veteran director and it shows. Of course, I think it could have been better. The writing was a bit weaker than most and I think it could have been a lot better in the acting department but I love Columbo and I have seen almost all of them many times. I think even the casting would have been better besides just Falk and Foxworth in the roles but I'll take Columbo with the good, the bad, the ugly, and sometimes brilliant episodes.

In this Columbo story our persistent LAPD detective moves among the elite of what is called the military industrial complex. I wonder how the story might be handled today given the history of the paramilitary private organizations in the past quarter of a century. Remember the date of this episode was 1989 before Desert Storm.

Robert Foxworth who usually plays hard bitten villains is at his worst here in this story. He's a retired army colonel who works for this paramilitary type of outfit. One part of it is a think tank, a second part is paramilitary training for would be soldiers of fortune. A third involves some illegal activities that Foxworth wants no one, especially retired war hero General Stephen Elliott who is the chairman of the board of the place to know about.

Which when his Sergeant Major Andy Romano threatens to spill the beans he kills him and then disguises the death to look like a training accident.

Best scene is when Columbo answers Foxworth's question of when did he start suspecting him. The answer is a pip and it total keeping with the characters of both men.

Second best scene is Columbo interviewing some of the recruits for this paramilitary training. What specimens they are.

Foxworth should have gotten away with it, see what trips him up.

I have always been a big lover of the Columbo series for the diverting stories, great villains(think Patrick McGoohan, Leonard Nimoy, Nicol Williamson, Jack Cassidy and Robert Culp), intelligent dialogue and of course Columbo himself embodied by the now regrettably late Peter Falk. Grand Deceptions is not a bad episode, but while not as dull as Last Salute to the Commodore or as lame as No Time to Die it is one of the lesser episodes of the series to me. I have heard a lot of people saying that the later episodes don't quite match the pre-1989 episodes. I kind of agree with this, however that is not to say they are bad.

With a small handful of exceptions, a lot of them are decent and some like Ashes to Ashes, Agenda for Murder, A Bird in the Hand and Death Hits the Jackpot are to a standard worthy of the pre-1989 episodes. I will give credit where it's due, like all Columbo episode it looks great with slick editing and striking locations, and it is solidly directed. The music is nothing extraordinary, but it still has a certain groove and atmosphere to it. Peter Falk tries his best and there are times where he does deliver but there is not him at his best, and it felt as though he was secondary to the rest of the characters. This wouldn't matter so much, if those characters were actually interesting, but on the whole I found them dull, and that is including Brailie.

Likewise with the story, which instead of bright, breezy and above all diverting, was too drab, too stiff and too serious, complete with an ending that was good in idea but underdeveloped and implausible in execution and build-up that quite frankly takes too long to set up. The scripts I often found intelligent and clever with some good tension and humour. Not here though, it felt stiff and humourless. The acting is not great, though Steven Elliot is quite good. Robert Foxworth has to work with one of the blander villains of the series, and while I have nothing against arrogant characters(Columbo has had its fair share of them and some of them, like Leonard Nimoy's character in A Stitch in Crime are some of the most memorable guest turns) the material is below the usual standards I get from watching Columbo, so I actually found his arrogance got on my nerves. His interaction with Columbo didn't spark much joy either.

All in all, somewhat watchable, but in my opinion a lesser entry while not the worst. It's not as if Columbo is a poor series, in fact it is one of the finest series of its kind, all the more reason for Grand Deceptions to have been so much better. If I were to say whether it was worth watching, I'd say any Columbo episode is worth watching once, but for me, I'd rather stick to the likes of A Stitch in Crime, By Dawn's Early Light, Any Old Port in a Storm, Etude in Black, Forgotten Lady, Death Lends a Hand, Blueprint for Murder and How to Dial a Murder.

5/10 Bethany Cox