Wednesday

Last night I saw a very odd film. Starring Samuel L. Jackson and Milla Jovovich, you might think you'd (or I'd) have heard of it before. It's called No Good Deed and came out in 2002. Apparently its alternative title is The House on Turk Street, which is the name of the short story the film is based on. Looking its author up, you find that he also wrote The Maltese Falcon and other film noir type novels. This helps explain a bit of this film's bizarreness, since it is a film noir movie set in the present day. I believe its main faults are that it's terribly miscast and directed, but there is also a problem with the story. Perhaps this could be rescued by new cast and direction, but I suspect there's a reason a good writer's short story was never made into a film before - because it's not that good. There is very little tension or chemistry here. I didn't engage with anything that was going on. They tried to update some aspects of the story, but left others lingering in the 1940s, which just made it odd. It felt empty and hollow - the house they chose to shoot in, the locations and the camera-work. It looked like a TV movie, and I wouldn't be surprised if this didn't go straight to video (if it even made it to cinemas). The change of title was obviously for the worse, but the ending of the movie shows that there was some glimmer of a good idea in here somewhere.