Trashy cinema need not always be as awful as it sounds. Like junk food, trashy films have a value of their own. Not this one, though. Director Yohance Brinson’s thriller entitled Fated is fated for failure. It tries to be a sum-total of many adrenaline-pumping experiences and ends up falling flat on its face.
Not that it aspires to a high life. From the start, we know Brinson wants to make a lowbrow slip-in-slip-out thriller with lots of talk about money but little of it to show on screen. That Fated fails even on that low level of expectancy is a measure of its incompetence.
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The film boasts of three screenplay writers. Besides Brinson, two others Ken Franklin and JaVonnie Pinkney put their intelligent(?) heads together to come up with a yarn yoked to the yawn.
The film’s sheer clunkiness hits us hard. Everyone speaks as if reciting lines from a teleprompter. Our hero is a very successful investment banker Miles Carter(Larry Lowe) who is talked about by his bosses in superlatives in Miles’ hearing distance, and of course, ours, as though they were part of an advertisement for intelligence-enhancement pills.
We know this kind of shrill pill, billboard bliss arrangement can’t last. It doesn’t. Soon(alas, not soon enough as the narrative takes its time) Miles starts getting threatening text messages asking him to do illegal things. Or else!
In the beginning, we had seen how much Miles loved his grandmother. They hugged and kissed and got on like two gamblers sharing their loot. So no prizes for guessing whom the mysterious blackmailer targets first.After the dirty deed, the assailant texts, “If you had listened to me your grandmother wouldn’t be in a coma.” Bonus points for textual lucidity.
A little later when Miles is talking to the cops another text message: “You should not have spoken to the cops.”
No explanation was offered until the end as to how the assailant knew what Miles was doing at any given time. Maybe the writers would figure out this mystery one day and text this writer.
The characters are so stiff they look like cardboard cut-outs at your neighbourhood multiplex. There is a detective wearing a self-important hat (Johh Schwan) who seems to have watched Jack Nicholson in Chinatown too many times to get it straight.
Throughout this maddening titanically trite crime drama, there is a feeling of an amateur high school performance. The villain when she shows herself midway makes so many faces, she gives psychological dysfunctionalism a bad name. Just like this film whose thriller tag makes it acutely embarrassing. Not even the director’s closest family and friends would find this amateurish thriller thrilling.