DETAINED - Mark Reviews Movies

Detained, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 1, 2024

Detained bets too much on its ability to con and surprise us. Here's a movie that revolves around two major twists. One of them is more a relief than a shock, because the initial setup of this story is increasingly unbelievable and silly.

The second will only come as a surprise for those who somehow have never seen an intentionally twisty thriller. Even then, it'd probably be a safe bet to trust the intelligence of such a first-timer over the capacity of director Felipe Mucci and Jeremy Palmer's screenplay to pull one over on anyone. The filmmakers definitely don't believe in our smarts to get ahead of their little game.

At first, the mystery here involves the arrest of Rebecca (Abbie Cornish), who wakes up in a police interrogation room after an apparently rough night out at the bar. Oh, before that, the movie gives a flash-forward to the story's epilogue, as some cops are investigating a fatal fire, presumed to be a case of arson, at the police station where the whole of the tale is set. It's one thing to unintentionally telegraph what's coming, but what was the thinking in basically telling the audience exactly what and whom they should be looking for before the plot even begins?

Anyway, Rebecca is being investigated for the death of a cyclist the previous night. People can place her at the bar and testify that she had quite a bit to drink. More damning, the hood of her car is covered in blood, and it's only a matter of time before the two detectives, Avery (Laz Alonso) and Moon (Moon Bloodgood), on the case get back DNA testing on the blood that will, based on everything else, prove she killed the guy while driving under the influence.

Obviously, we know that something is amiss before the premise is even established. What kind of routine interrogation and investigation, after all, result in several people dying and an entire police station burning to the ground? It's difficult to understate how big a miscalculation that opening scene is in trying to maintain the basic integrity of this mystery. Did the filmmakers not trust themselves to make the wrongly-accused story in the first act compelling? The funny thing is that it's not, but funnier still, it's not specifically because the movie itself flat-out tells us we shouldn't care about it with that introduction.

A lot of things aren't right here. The police station is being renovated, so it is littered with construction equipment and still has some fresh paint on the walls. When Rebecca asks to speak with her attorney, the lawyer who shows up isn't hers, and Isaac (Justin H. Min) speaks as if his only knowledge of the law has come from TV. The detectives keep letting their prime suspect wander around without handcuffs, and at one point, one of the detectives brings a pistol into a holding cell, resulting in another death that the cops can easily pin on Rebecca.

This is all very dumb, but there is a decent explanation for that. It comes with the first twist, which pits Rebecca against Avery and Moon in a completely different way. They, as well a their various accomplices, want Rebecca's money, and based on her relationship with a con man who had swindled about $8 million and was killed by an unknown entity, the team of crooked people assume those millions are in her bank account.

That's all that probably can be said without giving away too much. The movie itself, after all, does a fine enough job ruining its own attempts at surprise by way of the staging, as well as how the camera keeps certain characters in view for us to suspect them and what they're really doing. Mostly, it's in how the screenplay poaches its sole red herring with so much intensity and for so long that it dissolves to pieces in short time. There's only one logical answer after that, and since the plot's construction keeps killing off the accomplices one by one under not-so-puzzling circumstances, even those who don't catch on can almost certainly arrive at the answer by way of simple process of elimination.

Other than that complete failure, a couple of performances, namely Cornish and Alonso, are convincing—too much so in one case, since the staging keeps that actor in frame so much that we can see the gears moving. Detained really does just pile on the errors in the judgment—both in how it assumes our lack of intelligence and in giving away far too much before it needs to.

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