DANGEROUS LIES (2020)

Studio:      Netflix
Director:    Michael M. Scott
Writer:      David Golden
Producer:  Stephanie Slack, Margret H. Huddleston
Stars:     Camila Mendes, Jessie T. Usher, Jamie Chung, Cam Gigandet, Sasha Alexander, Elliott Gould

Review Score:

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Summary:

A struggling young couple becomes embroiled in a mystery of deceit, murder, and money when they unexpectedly inherit a wealthy man’s property.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Raymond Gaskin shoots a busboy while robbing Chicago’s Smile Diner where Katie Franklin works as a waitress. Katie’s husband Adam Kettner, a grad student waiting to drive Katie home, subdues the shooter.

Four Months Later – Katie continues working at her new job as an in-home caregiver to Leonard Wellsley, who adores Katie as a friend. Struggling financially since Adam dropped out of school, Katie convinces Leonard to hire Adam as a gardener.

Posing as a real estate agent, ex-con Mickey Hayden comes to Leonard’s house expressing an interest to buy. After Katie turns him away, Hayden begins secretly stalking Katie and Adam.

Katie’s agency supervisor George Calvern comes to Leonard’s house for a routine welfare check. Katie keeps it quiet that her husband now works there too.

Leonard writes Katie a $7,000 check. Katie considers returning the overpayment, but Adam convinces her they need to cash it immediately to pay their bills.

Katie finds Leonard dead the next day. While searching an old trunk, Adam finds $100,000 in cash. Adam and Katie discuss keeping the money before calling 911. Detective Chesler questions the couple as part of the police’s investigation.

Still desperate for money, Adam goes to Leonard’s house alone to count the cash. Hayden breaks in and knocks Adam unconscious. Adam never sees his attacker. Afterward, Katie and Adam decide to stash the cash in a bank safe deposit box.

Attorney Julia Byron-Kim produces a will revealing Leonard left his property to Katie. Katie and Adam move into the house.

Hayden gets Katie alone by calling Adam to the police station under the pretense of asking more questions about the diner incident. Hayden intimidates Katie over the house and Leonard’s death. Meanwhile, Detective Chesler mentions that Raymond Gaskin was killed in prison, so she doesn’t know why anyone would call Adam downtown.

As she digs further into Katie’s inheritance and Leonard’s death, Chesler plants the notion with Katie that Adam could be involved in a conspiracy to steal Leonard’s money. Adam’s paranoia about being followed as well as Katie’s own suspicions about Adam create further conflict between the couple.

Chesler suggests to Katie’s supervisor George Calvern that Katie possibly exploited Leonard for personal gain. George angrily confronts Katie at the house until Katie turns him away.

Katie finds a secret room in Leonard’s garage. A hidden hatch reveals a bag of stolen diamonds and the bullet-riddled corpse of Ethan Doyle, who used to work for Leonard until he suddenly vanished. Adam and Katie conclude Ethan was shot and then used Leonard’s garage as a hideout before dying from his wound. To keep the diamonds secret, Adam stops Katie from calling Chesler, disposes of the body, and burns all papers related to Ethan.

George Calvern enters Leonard’s house during the night. Adam startles George, who falls down a staircase and dies.

With Chesler still sowing doubts about Adam, Katie seeks counsel from Julia. Katie tells Julia about the cash as well as the diamonds. When the two women check the bank, they find the money missing from the safe deposit box. Julia suggests Adam plans to go on the run without Katie.

When she returns home, Katie finds Adam packing up after having hidden the diamonds in an undisclosed location. Adam insists he was not going to leave without Katie. Adam explains he discovered Hayden was Ethan Doyle’s accomplice in a $3,000,000 diamond heist. As the person who shot Ethan, Adam now suspects Hayden is coming after he and Katie to recover the diamonds.

Hayden sneaks into the house and takes Katie at gunpoint. Adam and Hayden kill each other in a gunfight.

Julia arrives. Julia reveals she was Hayden’s public defender and she plotted with him to retrieve the missing diamonds. Julia explains that Hayden killed Leonard by tampering with his medication while she forged the will to get into the house through Katie. Julia takes Katie at gunpoint as Katie insists she doesn’t know where Adam hid the diamonds. Chesler rescues Katie unexpectedly by arriving in time to shoot Julia dead.

Four Months Later – Chesler informs Katie, who is pregnant with Adam’s child, that her husband was posthumously cleared of any wrongdoing. Katie repeats that she still doesn’t know where the diamonds are. Katie walks away after turning on the sprinklers, which wash away dirt revealing where Adam hid the diamonds.

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Review:

“Dangerous Lies” sounds like the title of a sexy theatrical thriller that might have been titillating during Sharon Stone’s “Basic Instinct” heyday. Or at least like a straight-to-VHS knockoff starring someone from “Baywatch” and a low-rung Baldwin brother.

It’s neither of those things, of course. It’s another mushy potato in Netflix’s overflowing pit of expired produce that was never fresh to begin with.

Struggling no more than any average pairing of people, life seemed to be going well enough for Katie and her husband Adam. She was a diner waitress. He was a grad student. Not exactly royals ready for Camelot. Yet they lived in a pretty posh place for Southside Chicago and the lights of love in their eyes signaled a bright future ahead.

Then a robber murdered a busboy and terrified Katie until Adam took down the attacker. Despite Adam being hailed as a hero and the two of them emerging unharmed, everything went downhill after that. Among the many things the movie doesn’t have an answer for is exactly how their situation became so bad so fast. But Adam dropped out of school, Katie switched gigs to become an in-home caregiver, and the constantly bickering lovebirds are drowning in debt they apparently didn’t have four months ago in the prologue.

Leonard, the wealthy old man Katie works for, amusingly insists, “a young couple starting out shouldn’t have to worry about money.” Really, Leonard? What else do a young husband and wife have to worry about?

Anyway, Leonard lends two helping hands by giving Adam a job and Katie a $7,000 bonus. This inadvertently plants the first two seeds of suspicion because the day after cashing her check, Katie finds Leonard dead. Katie can’t call 911 yet because Adam also found $100,000 in cash hidden in an old trunk barely sixty seconds later. Now the two of them have to solve the dilemma of what to do about the money as well as the dead body.

They do the right thing by calling the coroner regarding Leonard while quietly keeping the cash for themselves. Trouble is, there’s a mysterious man secretly skulking around who might know about the missing moolah. After a lawyer appears from thin air to produce a will no one knew existed, the situation grows stranger. Turns out Leonard left his estate to Katie. These dots suggest to an investigating detective that an intricate conspiracy of duplicitous agendas and murderous motives may be afoot. Are Katie and Adam involved, or could it be one or both of the only other two people in play?

In an alternate timeline, the tap water tepidness of “Dangerous Lies” would have been fit for a Valerie Bertinelli vehicle on the CBS Wednesday Night Movie. Arriving 35 years after its made-for-TV formula had already flatlined, “Dangerous Lies” instead aligns with the aesthetics of a modern CW melodrama on sedated steroids. This means the film features neon Gotham color schemes for nighttime exteriors, frequent needle drops from nondescript broken heart songs, and camera-friendly faces like that of “Riverdale” star Camila Mendes.

It also means your bingo card better have spaces for plenty of textbook thriller tropes. Anything mildly imaginative, unpredictable, or otherwise out of the ordinary will never see a stamp, leaving “Dangerous Lies” to take the title as the next disposable champion of entry level entertainment.

A secret stash of stolen diamonds. Someone dying from an accidental fall down a staircase. “Dangerous Lies” loads up on rote plot beats like it read one noir novel from 1950 and simply transposed the most common elements to a contemporary setting.

It’s almost too close to call which red herring or minor misdirect hits the dullest dead end. I’m going with the speedily forgotten mention of an unidentified lost love for Leonard. Her possible involvement in Leonard’s past gets hilariously highlighted by a keepsake newspaper clipping plainly titled “Chicago Woman Killed in Car Accident.” Apparently a common person killed in an everyday occurrence is so rare for a major metropolitan city, her death earned a front-page headline with an above-the-fold photo too.

Until the climax, the film’s biggest beat of action comes from someone accidentally triggering a mousetrap, not even a rattrap, for a cheap jolt to make sure viewers aren’t asleep yet. It’s easy to feel narcoleptic though. The rest of the movie’s supposed suspense hides inside inert events like stalkers staring into side view mirrors, people shooting shifty looks, instigating intimidation, or vaguely threatening someone through cryptic confrontations.

The conclusion hits so many ludicrous lowlights of serendipitous arrivals with ridiculous reveals, it almost has to be seen for its outrageous absurdity to be believed. Don’t take that as a recommendation to actually see “Dangerous Lies.” I’m only scoring the film with a “well, whatever” 50/100 because it is too blandly innocuous to inspire an outright negative reaction.

I wouldn’t argue with someone wanting to rate it lower however. I couldn’t argue anyway. By the time you read this, I will have long since forgotten everything there is to this movie.

Review Score: 50

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