Troubled Waters

...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.

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.

A mediocre movie at best. The plot has promise – kidnapping, adultery, and a psychic FBI agent – but something falls apart in the execution of the concept for a film into an actual theatrical event. Must be the screen writing. The story drags at times and it seems like an eternity before the heroes can figure out what the viewer has already determined as obvious. And that is with the aid of a psychic detective – the scenes where she senses what has occurred are interesting but do not result in moving the storyline forward by leaps and bounds. But then the summing up at the end dumps a whole lot of facts on the viewer that seems to come from nowhere. Then too there is the parallel plot of medical problems with the heroine that remains unresolved at the end.

Let's review what is good about the movie. Shauna Black is certainly nice to look at but one can only wish that Laura Vandervoort would have had a larger part. The "ending" that opens the movie is revealed to be an incomplete truth about three quarters the way through and the real ending could have been a real show stopper. Jennifer Beals does yeoman's work with the material she has been handed – she deserves better. Finally the movie yields the best-dressed software company secretary in many years.

Not much to recommend here.

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.

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.