by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, after I Didn’t Kill My Sister — a good movie with a dumb title — Lifetime ran Trust
No One, also an Odyssey Media production
and also a film that began with a different name (Corrupt), but a far inferior production, a dull story about
the attempts of Pittsburgh district attorney Frank Murphy (the hot
African-American actor Andrew Moodie — playing a character named Murphy? He
must be one of those “Black Irish” we keep hearing about) to get the goods on a
Mafia-connected money launderer named Vargano (Douglas Kidd). It’s not actually
specified by screenwriters Curtis James Crawford (who also directed) and Cathy
and Wendy McKernan that he’s part of the Mafia, but he has an Italian-sounding
name, he’s played by a swarthy actor who looks like Leonardo Di Caprio’s big
brother, and he’s escaped prosecution by means of a large, muscular, mostly
bald sandy-haired hit man, Taylor (Layton Morrison), who manages through almost
supernatural powers to identify and knock off any potential witness against
Vargano before the D.A. can actually get that person to court to testify
against him. The leading character of the movie is actually Kate MacIntyre
(Nicole de Boer), a forensic accountant who when she isn’t teaching at a local
college (there’s a scene of her giving a lecture to her students in which she
explains mark-to-market accounting) works under the D.A. trying to get the
goods on Vargano by looking through all his accounting records to see if she
can find anomalies that would indicate he’s using his “legitimate” businesses
as a front for money laundering.
Vargano, meanwhile, is behaving more like a
James Bond villain than a classical movie Mafioso; virtually the only times we actually see him are
when he’s lounging on his yacht with two anonymous bimbos in tow to service
some of his other needs. (The fact that he seems to be able to do this
year-round in Pittsburgh, of all places, itself requires a certain suspension
of disbelief.) Murphy manages to get Kate to leave her job as a professor and
join his task force even though the last time she worked for him she nearly got
killed and the witness she had developed was killed. At first they work out of Murphy’s own
offices until a Black hit man (Dennis LaFond), a confederate of Taylor’s,
disguises himself as a janitor and sets a bomb in the storage room holding the
files Murphy and his staff have assembled about Vargano and his questionable —
and, they hope, provably illegal — business activities. Kate, the obviously
intended victim, is uninjured because she went out to replenish the group’s
coffee supply as they worked into the night, but her assistant Vivian (Allison
Brennan) is injured and ends up in the hospital. So Murphy orders his crew to
leave the office and move into a safe house where they can be protected from
Vargano’s thugs, and one of the three police officers assigned to Kate’s
detail, Carl (Jon MacLaren), bails out on the ground that he’s too concerned
about his family to want to work a job that might get himself killed. The two
cops that end up with Kate in the safe house are hunky young Detective Daniel
Leaton (Scott Gibson) and older, stouter, taller and more avuncular, but still
attractive, Greg Nealand (Peter Michael Dillon), who worms out of Kate the
information that she’s single and then declares his love for her. As the film
progresses (in the manner of a disease), Murphy becomes aware that there is a
“mole” in his operation who’s leaking Vargano and his organization all the
information about his investigation, including the identities of his potential
witnesses (so Vargano can have Taylor and his Black confederate kill them) and
the businesses he owns that Murphy and Kate are looking at — and we become aware that one of the two cops hiding out
with Kate in the safe house, where they’ve set a burglar alarm so she literally
can’t leave, is the mole.
Things heat up when Kate figures out how to get out
of the safe house (she opens a window, it sets the alarm, and she scopes Leaton
out as he resets it, thereby getting the code) and meets another member of
Murphy’s office staff, Jessica Hall (Helene Alexis-Seymour), to obtain a file
on the Benton corporation, which Vargano ostensibly “bought,” albeit at an
inflated price. Only the file reveals that Vargano didn’t have to buy the
Benton corporation because he already owned it — it was incorporated with
Vargano’s mother as a front — and the “purchase price” was really money he was
laundering for the Mob. Then Jessica is run down by a driver on Vargano’s
payroll and killed (and it seems a bit racist to have the white Vivian merely
injured by the thugs, and the Black Jessica killed by them — it also seemed a
bit stupid that, since they killed her because she got the Benton file to Kate,
they didn’t go back and fetch her laptop, which ended up on the ground near her
body and probably had a copy on its hard drive; but then again no one from the
police or the D.A.’s office seems to think of looking on her laptop for the
file either). At first we’re carefully led to believe the mole is Leaton, not
only because Crawford and the McKernans drop hints (like showing him using his
cell phone to call a mysterious party — for some reason they’ve barred Kate
from having a cell phone or an Internet connection at the safe house but both
he and Nealand use their cell
phones all the time; in a real safe-house situation, wouldn’t they have set up
a secure landline so they and Kate could call Murphy’s office but nowhere else,
instead of risking having their operation compromised by a traceable cell-phone
signal?) but because he’s the hottest-looking guy in the movie and part of the
Lifetime iconography is that the hottest-looking guy in a Lifetime movie is
almost always a black-hearted
villain; but I was also bracing myself for a reversal in which Nealand would
turn out to be the mole, and that duly happened when Taylor and the Black guy
found out where the safe house was and hatched with Nealand (via cell phone!) a
plot whereby Nealand would drug Leaton so Taylor and his Black confederate
could kidnap Kate; she gets into an SUV with Nealand and suddenly recognizes
the Black guy as the “janitor” she saw the night before, and realizes that
she’s being kidnapped by Vargano’s hit men and Nealand is the mole.
There’s a
final confrontation in which the baddies threaten to torture Kate unless she
gives them the password to the file so they can erase it and Vargano can get
off scot-free again, but
ultimately Leaton recovers consciousness, gives chase, and while his scrawny
little frame (which we’ve already seen topless coming out of a shower, with
only a towel around his waist — yum) is no match for Taylor’s bulk and it looks
like Taylor will literally make
mincemeat out of him in a one-on-one confrontation, ultimately Kate comes up
with the gun and shoots down Taylor just as he’s about to kill Leaton, and the
other cops arrive, take the wounded Taylor and the Black guy into custody, and
the D.A. has the evidence he needs to indict Vargano before the deadline by
which he’d either have to come up with something against him or drop all
charges. Tell No One isn’t a bad
movie; it’s just dull, and while Vargano and Taylor are convincing figures of
menace (enough to make me wish the writers had emphasized the bad guys more and
the comparatively boring good guys less), overall it’s simply not a very
interesting movie. It’s full of sporadic twitches of action that seem to be
there merely because it occurred to Crawford and the McKernans that
white-collar crime is boring to watch, and the efforts to catch white-collar
criminals are also boring — there are way too many scenes of Kate and others poring over manila folders
containing spreadsheets and other financial documents, and like all movies
about white-collar crime this requires endless explanations about just what all
those numbers mean and why what
the bad guys are doing is illegal. There are a few atmospheric shots of
Pittsburgh by night — in fact Crawford likes to take his cameras overhead and
give views of the city’s night lights just as a relief from the boredom of his
and the McKernans’ plot — and an overall sense that Trust No One might actually have been a better movie with more
compelling direction and writing, and more of a focus on the villains than the
heroes. More soft-core porn scenes would have helped; I would have liked to see
Nealand get to have sex with Kate during their long joint incarceration in that
safe house, and afterwards Kate get into a tizzy when she finds out she’s
pregnant with the child of the corrupt cop who tried to kill her!
