Writer(s): Bryan Dick
Starring: Fiona Gubelmann, John Lee Ames, Scott Bailey, and Scott Broderick
I probably sound like a broken record:
there are only so many euphemisms and synonyms for “terrible”,
and running through MarVista’s movie catalogue has certainly tested
my vocabulary limitations in that regard. But the main issue at play
here, and one that I keep learning the farther and farther I dip into
this project, is just how many different layers, of “bad” there
really are: Every time I think I’ve experienced the pinnacle of
incompetence, another movie comes along that tests my limits even
more.
Case in point: I have reamed many
a-main character from the studio’s repertoire for being unlikable,
but none of them have ever approached the reprehensible levels of
Fiona Gubelmann’s Christine McCullers. Here’s a woman who has
literally been directly responsible for all of the
hardships she faces, yet still plays the pity card at every turn, as
if she’s a victim of circumstances outside her control. And I guess
we, as the viewer, are just supposed to support her as she never
learns her lesson, continuing to dig herself in deeper; we’re
supposed to find our solace in knowing that this is a MarVista movie,
and that, by the end, we know all of her misfortunes will turn
completely around.
But I didn’t. I hated her from the
first moment I saw her, and I hated her more with each passing
minute, to the extent that even finishing this movie became a
blood-boiling chore. I have said before that there’s nothing worse
than a movie that causes feelings of indifference over hatred,
because at least hatred makes you feel something, whereas
indifference is just…boring; here's a movie that surely
pushes the truth of that theory to its absolute limits.
Christine is a cop on the “rough” streets of a small,
unnamed city (the only kind in these movies), where she patrols with
her father. One night, while driving a routine route, the cops see a
hooded figure running down the sidewalk, a flailing woman frantically
giving chase. With no idea of what’s going on, or even what crime
(if any) has been committed, Christine jumps out of the car, ignores
her father’s pleas to wait for backup (you'll quickly learn that
listening to others is not her strong suit), follows the subject into
the alley, and confronts him at gunpoint.
Her quick action results in the city's
biggest bust to date: a 15-year-old kid who has stolen a bag of
chips from a convenience store.
He claims it’s because his mom hasn’t been home in days, and that
he’s hungry, but Christine still informs him that she must arrest
him. Huh? A kid? Over an item that couldn’t cost more than $2?
Sure, lady. (Granted, she at least has an understanding, consoling
tone, and doesn’t come off as some brash, trigger happy officer,
but this is still pretty stupid.) In just one instance of many that makes
Christine look like a bungling idiot—Mr. Magoo made flesh—the
dumb bitch somehow lets a teenaged child squirm free of her grasp, grab her gun,
and turn the tables. Of course now is when her dad joins the fray and
takes charge of the situation, calming the subject down, who gives
clear signs that he is about to surrender. And this is the
moment—this very moment when the situation is under complete
control--that Ms. McCunters decides is the perfect time to go for a
backup gun she has hidden away; when her dad notices, he yells for
her to stop (probably not the smartest thing he could do in that
situation), the young kid panics, and shoots them both before getting
shot himself. Both the victim, and Christine's dad die in the ensuing
shootout; perhaps saddest of all is that Christine does not.
When we next see her, a little while
later, she is suffering a limp from a bullet that hit her upper
torso. (Seriously, in the opening scene, she lays in a pool of her
own blood, body only seen from the waist up; not once is a leg injury
even hinted at. Even later on, when they replay the shooting, she is
clearly shot above the legs.) Her disability prevents her from
patrolling the streets (probably a good thing for all), and has
instead confined her to a dispatcher role. As it turns out, she sucks
at that, too.
One day, a kid calls in, claiming he’s
seen a boogeyman, and that he needs help. Christine dismisses it as a
prank call almost immediately, and urges the child, several times, to
hang up, stressing that the line is for emergency calls only. She
clearly sounds agitated, finding relief only after the kid finally
complies with her request. A couple of days later she’s called into
the office to speak with her bosses: turns out the child she ignored
was actually pleading for help on behalf of another kid, a teen who
was murdered that night. She’s placed on unpaid suspension barring
the outcome of the ensuing investigation, then for another two months
after they find her negligible, but somehow valuable enough not to
terminate.
Despite her “suspended” status,
though—and also in spite of the fact she hasn’t been an actual
cop for months—the police station never takes her gun or her badge
away. And do you know why that’s convenient? Because she doesn’t
think the widely-accepted suspects, the boy’s parents, are the ones
that carried out this heinous crime! So, after already getting her
father, and another boy killed through her incompetence, and with a
job she desperately needs on the line, she launches her own
investigation into the murder that she herself failed to stop. Can
you say “tone deaf”?
The
aforementioned “investigation” consists of tracking down people
that the police should have already talked to (but, in some cases,
didn't), and either pulling out a gun and yelling at them to admit to
things they didn’t actually do, or asking basic suspects basic
questions that the police no doubt already asked. All this and for
what? What’s her endgame? In order to truly care for a character,
you have to understand and care for their goal. What does she
honestly hope to accomplish by doing this, and, perhaps more
importantly, why should we care? This isn't some woman who's been a
victim of unfortunate circumstance: This is a woman so stupid, she’s
already killed two people through her own selfish actions, actions
which she never shows a shred of remorse or accountability over (and
the one time she does, she's clearly seeking validation from a
friend). Despite her assurance that it's all about justice, and the synopsis assuring us it's about her guilt, it never
comes across that way: instead, the investigation just feels like a
way for her to clear her name, despite actually having legitimate
blood on her hands.
To cope with all of the bad luck that
she has completely brought upon herself, she frequents a local bar,
where she somehow meets an attractive man who takes an interest in
her. She assures him that he shouldn’t be interested, and shows her
the crutch she uses to get around, something that’s pretty
goddamned obvious considering she stumbles around everywhere in the first few scenes like a
baby duck trying to walk for the first time in the movie's initial
post-injury stages; an injury that seems to change in location and
severity by the minute. The man, who luckily for her happens to be an
actual cop with real credentials, assures her it’s okay and that he
still wants to be with her, even though she has absolutely no
appealing characteristics whatsoever. (No joke, she smiles once
the entire movie, and spends the
rest of the time either pitying herself, or using other people for
her own personal gain.)
There have been several other movies
where I’ve been against the leads getting together: most of the
time, it’s simply because the actors are awful, or lack the basic
chemistry necessary to make me think they deserve each other. Other
times, despite the writers’ insistence that you cheer for them to
get with the other lead, they just seem to fit better with a
different character. But this is the very first time where the
thought of her with anyone made me physically ill: this is an
abhorrent character, who has wreaked havoc on herself and everything
around her, without so much as an apology, or a basic acknowledgment
that she is a terrible person; the idea that we are supposed to cheer
for her to do anything except die alone is one of the great
miscalculations of the entire 21st century. (Actually, the
love story isn't necessary at all; it would still be an awful movie
without it, but at least a little shorter and minus one overblown plot point.)
Anyway, her investigation picks up: she
starts enlisting the aide of actual on-duty cops to help her,
something that would get everyone involved fired if they found out.
But why should she care how her terrible decisions and complete lack
of moral awareness affect others? She's got a name to clear, and it's
entirely her own. Oh, and the parents who are going to jail for
murdering their kid, but they are just the lucky beneficiaries of her
obsessive need to prove to everyone that she's right about
everything, and everyone else is wrong.
So she breaks into house after house,
and follows suspect after suspect, and falls down from her slight
knee bruise that's made to sound like an amputation-worthy injury (no
joke) time and time again, all without police credentials or a search
warrant, and all without the department's knowledge that she's going
behind their backs to find a killer that they don't seem to have any
interest in finding. If only they all had selfish reasons to dig
deeper into the evidence like Ms. Child Killer does here, maybe they
would have seen the errors of their ways and tried to find the real
perpetrator a little harder.
Really, it all comes down to three
words: fuck this movie. Fuck everything about it. It's alarming in
its tone-deaf sincerity, in which we're supposed to cheer for a
former police officer to avoid accountability for her own actions. So
heartless is this cunt, that the only time we ever hear her apologize
is to a man with whom she had a one night stand, and then kicked him
out the following morning—and only because she needs his help. She
doesn't apologize to her father's grave, or even to the mother of the
child she so carelessly allowed to be killed, who she visits in
prison simply to tell her she believes she's innocent; she doesn't
apologize to the janitor she holds at gunpoint, screaming at him to
admit to murders he never committed. This is a woman who finds her
entire life in hot water thanks to a series of bad decisions, and the
only way she can fathom getting out is by making a series of even
worse decisions.
And of course, it works, because by the
end, she solves the murder and gets her old job back. She also gets
the officer to fall for her, despite having the personality of a
fucking napkin (actually, that's not true, because napkins clean up
messes instead of constantly creating them). Nevermind that she
trespassed and gained every bit of evidence illegally, and that she
risked the jobs—and lives--of others to achieve her own goal...all
that matters is that she managed to prove that for every two lives
she murders, she's able to save the only one that matters to her: her
own.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS
(POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD)
- The scene where a superior makes fun of her limp while making a crying face is both politically incorrect, and absolutely fucking hilarious; in fact, it's the only scene that isn't genuinely infuriating in the entire movie (although the scene right after, in which Christine is so enraged by it that she throws her cane away and walks down the stairs perfectly fine, is.)
- DRINKING GAME: Every time that stupid bitch falls, take a drink.
- If you're going to have a movie where the main character has to alternate between limping and crying all the time, shouldn't you make sure to hire an actress that can consistently do both?
- DRINKING GAME: Every time her limp changes, take a drink. In the beginning it's cartoonishly overblown, and by the end it's very nearly forgotten, yet we're notified she's very close to needing it removed because it's so badly damaged, and she falls over in dangerous situations no fewer than four times.
- She's broken into that suspect's house so many times at this point, that I think she owes him rent money.
- NOTE: If you're ever going to break into someone's house, it's probably a good idea not to touch their mail.
- How does she get to call the shots all the time? Her “partner's” a cop who doesn't have blood on his hands, and is actually still a credentialed cop, for God's sake, and yet she's ordering him around like she isn't the worst officer ever to don a uniform.
- If you're building a case around someone, it's probably not a great idea to do it in a car parked right in front of their house.
- It's also probably not a great idea to use the same car, parked directly in front, for several days, either.
- She calls an officer friend to warn him of impending danger; he doesn't get notification of the call or texts despite literally using his phone to take pictures at the exact same time.
- Example of her outstanding police ability: (Subject far away at night) “Freeze!” (subject runs; she takes one step forward and falls down).
ENTERTAINMENT RATING: 0/10.
TRAILER
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