i-Crime – Movie review

i-Crime

             Oh dear, oh dear. Sometimes you just watch a movie and wonder if the people who made it knew what it was they were making. Ya wonder if anyone ever had a moment during filming where they realized, geez, I think we’re missing our target. You know, like if you were making a thriller with an awkward subplot about getting someone accidentally pregnant. Maybe a dark horror film that had an abrupt slapstick comedy moment. You know, the sort of someone should really figure out before you send the movie out because, well, lots can be done in editing these days. i-Crime is just such a movie, a film that didn’t get the memo about tone and really missed their target audience

i-Crime is a thriller about a struggling young woman in LA who lazily wants to break into show business but isn’t sure how to do it. When an ‘internet famous’ young woman is kidnapped on camera the young woman immediately cries foul and suspects that something is fishy. Before she knows it the woman is secretly investigating the disappearance of the internet celeb for an online gossip rag and it seems that her hunch is right as the deeper she digs the more suspicious things get. As she digs though the obsessive fanbase for the celeb turns vicious, sending her death threats for questioning the disappearance. Too deep to quit though the girl finds an ally in a high school girl who also has questions about the disappearance and as they dig the truth slowly becomes uncovered and as it does, they find that the disappearance might not be as staged as they had first believed.

This is, at its core, a Lifetime movie. Why? Because it’s dated – this is a film obsessed with the ‘internet celebrity’ and with the weird era we had with Lonelygirl15 where so many people got caught up in the life of an internet girl’s videos on You Tube. This is such a weird film though because it does adult things, has the requisite ‘adult situations’ and all that yet this plays like a movie aimed at teen girls. The story is soap operatic, so melodramatic, and at times outright silly. It’s like they threw in all the adult themes to make themselves feel better. It doesn’t work though. As a Lifetime movie this works great – pretty young women in peril and investigating things that get them into trouble, a focus on lies and secret lives, and an ending that is all melodrama. Alas, this is categorized as a serious thriller and it doesn’t play like it. It doesn’t work. The whole film I added layers and depth and darkness that never appeared, though the ‘twists’, which were pretty well telegraphed (ahem, Lifetime again), did come. This just isn’t an ‘R’ rated film. It’s a TV movie dressed up to party but not really feeling it.

Some people may like the vibe of the film. The adult variety of Nancy Drew, and cool, it just didn’t work for me, or necessarily the film. The acting is a bit over the top but not awful. It’s generally filmed well, though the editing trickery is just sheer nonsense and only worked against the movie. The plot is so dated, so painfully dated that you cannot connect with the story at all. It just doesn’t work. Sadly, when you make a movie that is SO timely it has a shelf life and after it expires you have to wait for that topic to become nostalgia and we aren’t there yet. In the end what you’re left with a far from thrilling thriller that is just too made for television to be in any way effective.

4 out of 10