By Geno McGahee
I’ve said it for years. You cannot go wrong with Elliot Gould. He even kept his cool around Bill Cosby in THE DEVIL AND MAX DEVLIN. That was a great flick. Fucking Cosby. Whenever I think about guys like Cosby and Kevin Spacey, I think of that line “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It doesn’t fit? I think it does.
Getting back to my initial point before we were so rudely interrupted by Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey, you cannot go wrong with Gould. He is as Gould as gold and when I watched the trailer to the 2020 film on Netflix “DANGEROUS LIES,” I needed to check it out and the Gould statement held true. He was amazing, once again.
Katie (Camila Mendes) is making out with her husband, Adam (Jessie T. Usher), in their car, outside of the diner where she works. When they return to the diner, there’s a gunman holding the employees hostage. Adam sneaks over and takes him out with a frying pan and becomes a hero, but if he lives long enough, he may become the villain. That’s just FYI.
The married couple quickly became unhappily married as they live together. Adam has dropped out of school and the bill collectors are pounding down the door. He notes that he’s not taking a minimum wage job, but he dropped out of college. He should be a Walmart greeter for a bit. He needed to be humbled. As I was totally disgusted by Adam not manning up, I realized why he was acting in such a way. Katie started harping on him about the diner hero thing. Isn’t the proper reaction of EVERYONE when you save lives and stop a bad guy to be grateful and proud of them? She is all over her hubby for it. I can understand her being pissed about him being a bum, but he should get some props for his heroism.
Working with an employment agency, Katie is placed as an aide to Leonard (Elliot Gould), an older man that lives alone in a huge house. The two immediately click and Katie starts opening up to him, telling him of the financial and marital problems she’s having. He offers to help, but she declines, but offers up her husband as a groundskeeper to help with the finances. Adam is problematic and has a shady side that starts to show as he does the job.
After the first week of employment, Adam and Katie are cut a check for their efforts. Leonard wrote them a seven thousand dollar check. Katie wants to return it but Adam insists they keep it and they do. When Katie goes to see Leonard later on, she finds him dead. Instead of calling the police immediately, she calls Adam and they start hanging out with dead Leonard. That’s weird. I’ve never found a dead body but I think I would call the police right away. Sure, I could say “take your time. He’ll be dead all day,” but I still would have called them.
As Katie insists on calling the police, Adam discovers about 100 grand in a chest. They hide it and then call the police to cart the corpse away and start talking about keeping the money. Once again, Katie is hesitant, but Adam desperately wants the money. He is sick of the bill collectors and not having any cash in his pocket and he will not, under any circumstances, be a Walmart greeter.
Detective Chesler (Sasha Alexander) is on the case and she is immediately suspicious, but that’s her job. She is keeping a close eye on the duo and when she finds out that Leonard left the estate to Katie in his will, she is now hot on the trail and smells a rat. Katie is shitting bricks because she took the money, but if Leonard gave her everything, the money would be included.
George Calvern (Michael P. Northey) is Katie’s boss at the agency and when Chesler informs him that she was given a check for 7K and left the estate, he gets really pissed off. He storms over to the estate and nearly assaults Katie, screaming that she’s not going to ruin his business. I’ve pissed off my bosses before, but they’ve never shown up at my house and wanted to fight me. I guess there’s still time.
All sorts of weird shit starts happening. There is a guy spying on them, a shady lawyer, and the detective up their ass. At one point, the detective takes Katie aside and lets her know that her husband probably knew the guy at the diner and that it was a scam and that she married a con artist. Considering the strange behavior of Adam, she’s starting to buy that she married a piece of crap loser that doesn’t even deserve a jot at Walmart.
This film was doing very good at building mystery and suspense, but the payoff turned out to be less than stellar. OK, there’s gonna be some spoilers here. So proceed at your own risk…
Calvern breaks into the house, at night, in his suit, and as he walks up the stairs. Katie and Adam hear the noise and meet him at the top. He sees them and he falls down the stairs to his death. What the fuck was he doing there? If he was going to kill Katie for ruining his business, why was he still wearing his suit? Why not wear better clothing. If you’re going to kill somebody, you dress like a ninja. Everyone knows that. I just don’t get why the fuck he came back and how did he get in? Did they leave the door unlocked? If my boss came to my house and wanted to beat my ass, I would lock every window and door.
We find out why the guy has been following them around and another dead body shows up, but I became very disappointed overall with the climax of this film that was very good up to this point. We never find out if Adam was involved in the diner thing and there were a lot of loose ends left. They had a great thing going but ran out of ideas in the end.
DANGEROUS LIES is very good. Had the ending been stronger, this could have been awesome. Overall though, this is certainly worth a watch and very interesting throughout. I highly recommend it even if the ending is disappointing.
