Posted: 05/25/2005

Dead Easy

(2005)

by Ben Beard

To Grieco, or not to Grieco. (To Grieco!) Yes, the great Richard Grieco returns in this thriller from MTI Home Video.

A philandering high-powered advertising maverick, Simon (played by Richard Grieco, not the most famous ex-21 Jumpstreet star, but not the least famous either) has an affair with a co-worker who wants him to end it with his wife, Theresa. Living the high life in the hills of Capetown, South Africa, Simon is on the verge of selling his company that will make him rich in the process.

Hiring an unscrupulous detective to follow his wife, Simon discovers she is sleeping with a male model (with photos as proof), giving him the excuse he needs for divorcing her and starting a new relationship with his mistress. But when his wife receives a video of Simon having sex with another woman, she refuses to grant him the divorce.

The twists and turns begin when his wife disappears, and Simon realizes he has inadvertently unleashed a killer on her trail. Inquisitive cops appear, sniffing around asking questions about her disappearance. Snide, cheery, aggressive, the police immediately suspect the worse. Why are cops so unsympathetic in films, anyway? Has anyone in real life been bullied like the poor buggers on screen? An insensitive remark nowawadays can get you fired, as a police officer. Yet another area where movie world is stuck in the past.

A silly script that doesn’t quite earn its story manages to be entertaining while the direction is almost artfully done. The second half of the film takes a bizarre, masochistic turn that doesn’t quite work but who cares, it’s fun to see a chubby grown man putting on makeup. An interesting twist at the end, that doesn’t really make sense but by that point it doesn’t matter, provides the ironic shock one comes to expect from what’s passing as Noir these days.

As for Richard, the much-maligned Grieco isn’t a bad actor, after all, and here it shows. Sure, he lacks the layers of complication that fine actors—Benicio Del Torro or Sean Penn, for example—draw from their inner lives. But so do most actors, and almost all B-movie actors these days. He works hard to portray a man stretched to the breaking point, wracked with guilt. And he spends much of the film shirtless, which has to count for something. (It wins actresses of the same caliber academy awards.) Occasionally a line falls flat, but Grieco does his best to carry the film. It’s the run of the mill plot and uncertain motivations that ultimately lead to his and the film’s deflation.

Dead Easy runs the gamut of visual styles—jump cuts, crane shots, out of focus pieces, slow motion, filters, close ups, a hodge podge effort that occasionally works. But the director has not yet progressed to a point where the stylistic pieces work as a part of a unified whole. It would be easy to dismiss it as a bad film, and a bad film it is, but there’s are little pockets of talent here, waiting to be explored.

All in all, silly stuff, really.

Ben Beard is a film and music critic living in Chicago.

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