Obscure Hollywood – Freeze Frame

Cast as Sean Veil – a man wrongly accused of the Jasper Family murders – we see British comedian Lee Evans stretching his acting chops as a character whose mental tracks have become slightly buckled after being first found guilty, imprisoned, then acquitted and released by Her Majesty’s (Gawd bless ‘er!) justice system yet still held as the familycidal wrong ‘un by that kangaroo court known as Public Opinion.

Appearing on-screen fully Bic’d up and smooth of scalp there is much of the Russian Olympic swimmer about Veil, a bald head and no eye-brows Sean affecting such an appearance as to be freakishly unforgettable at even a moments glance – a deliberate act blatantly spelled out for us in the occasional Veil voice-over. But having not suffered serious head injuries from mis-placed toast I was unable to stop myself wondering about how, if a shaved head and one tone skin is really such a stand-out feature that makes one instantly unforgettable and thus completely recognisable at even a moments glance then why do you need a name badge above your bed in the cancer ward and uncomfortable thoughts about the current state of the American penal system.

Sean, once free from Big Mick’s mandatory Monday morning anal inspections, decides the absolute best way to ensure he is never again thought of as a wrong ‘un to The Man is to record and catalogue every last second of his day on camcorder cassettes that he then notes up and hold’s up down in his big-ass subterranean vault – the vault that he’s got plenty of room for, what with him living in the Trump Tower of disused factory iron accoutrements and everything.

The entire gaff is kitted out with cameras recording his waking, sleeping, and defecating moments in his own alibi-binding autobiographical Big Brother, and has much of Saw series about its voyeuristic monitoring. His paranoia has stretched to the keeping of notes on the latest doings of wrong doers splashed across the front of the dailies, each murder a potential chance for him to be accused once more and marked on one of the many maps filling the walls and drop down screens around and about, festooned with pins and strings anchoring newspaper clippings of each case.

The nub of the plot centres around the incompetent handling of the original murder case where media speculation replaced evidence in Veil’s trial and conviction, and echoes strongly of several real world tabloid scandals where a wrongly convicted person is forever accused regardless of what proof is lacking.

An advert announcing one of the original accusers in his case – Forensic Profiler Saul Seger played by Ian McNeice – will be giving a talk on his latest published efforts is all that’s required for the ultra-cautious Evans to rock on up to where the talk is being held and begin ranting about his own innocence and similar.

Naturally he’s restrained and removed and we then get to see the films second main-player of imagination suspension, spunky reporter-cum-nosey parker Katie Carter played by Rachel Stirling.

Backed up by wooden acting the Stirling performance is far from how simply dropping the words ‘wooden’ and ‘acting’ from the first part of this sentence would make it appear under her fizzog on the poster. Dropping in and out of the film at several key-points the incongruous acting on show means she was either too overwhelmed by the number of fingers she had to have in pies for the role she undertook or somebody somewhere has a freshly stained casting couch awaiting a little Febreeze.

Not to say she doesn’t have a handle on the requirements of her role; rather, she is so encumbered by the weight of emotions the script tries cramming into every characters psyche that the way she transitions between them is less sleight of hand a la Copperfield and more insultingly jarring a la Blaine.

The police, as noted, are depicted as bumbling buffoons, and seeing as we have the established the de facto go to guy to go to when tits go skywards it’s upon Veil’s world a brace of standard issue Doc Martin size tens stomp when a corpse comes a calling one emotionally moody morn. Dragged before the boys in blue Sean is a lock-in for the murder of a woman from long enough back to be not much in the way of looks but passable at ten to two when the taxi rank is near by.

An alibi is swiftly pulled from the back-catalogue cassette calendars and Veil is free to become even more accused and accursed in equal force de measure by the protagonist to his impeachments in another twist on the old ‘plod with last few days on the force’ trope, Detective Cancer Cop.

Dribbling blood and deteriorating every second Detective Louis Emeric – Sean McGinley – is the typical ‘original detective’ on the Japser Family Murders, and naturally sticks rigidly to his belief they let the murderer go so has spent the rest of his career desperately trying to Picard it and ‘make it so’ in a completely ununique moment of barrel scraping.

Chased throughout by the paper-thin plod Evans gets thrown a trope himself in the form of Katie Carter, a handy-dandy get-out-of-jail-free card they pull when the script looks in danger of falling down its own plot-holes and smacks of an impending double-cross the second her mug hits the screen.

The pacing is fairly fluid and rattles along well enough; it’s been evenly spaced between high tension and suspense followed by moments of respite tinged with suspicion. This is helped in part by a plot that treats its characters as either two dimensional copy-n-paste cops or over-burdening the talent with demands of emotive response to the point where Evans character swings from panic to complacent to angry to endearing so often it’s hard to really get behind his pleas of innocence. It certainly keeps you wondering about Veil and his guilt until the big reveal at the end, but after a while the whole thing wears you down into a state of unconcerned complacency over who did what and why to who and yearning for a gurning from the man Evans himself.

The ending has a massive plot hole that makes the entire cassette tape thing meaningless, and without giving away any spoilers (because it really is one helluva cracking performance from Evans) I think the words ‘email’, ‘internet’, and ‘…just pretend the entire last scene didn’t make you wonder ‘…but; if he’s got a bloody web-cam..?’’ say everything without really saying anything. To put it another way; if you’ve painted yourself into a corner then putting a hole through the wall to escape works but most people manage to do it so they end up by the door.

In Contusion

Like a live action re-enactment of Tolkien’s Hobbit, except instead of Mordor there’s murder and instead of following hairy dwarfs walking for three hours it’s Gollum’s Truman Show on screen; a much darker, nastier version than Peter Jackson could get the fans to sign off on but has probably story boarded and rough cut a few scenes with stand-ins and is waiting for the hype wagon to come rolling into town before a mysterious KongMaker500 leaks it onto the internet and the skies become filled with nerdgasmic juice and retainers and flame wars that’ll still be seen from space five hundred years from now.

Nishi Nef