Sarah turns in a review of upcoming indie flick, Hidden Agenda.
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| "What are you looking at, punk?" |
Ahhhhh. A gritty
detective drama that will hopefully quell all of our burning, unanswered
questions that Dexter left us with.
But semi-unfortunately for us, Hidden Agenda, directed by Aaron
Wilson, isn't the savior that we were looking for to tie up those loose
ends. A mish-mash of plot points, each
centering around equally stale main characters, painfully one-sided and without
any prophetic “light at the end of the tunnel”, Hidden Agenda spends an
hour and a half playing cerebral Pong without the satisfaction of clutching a
win at the end of the game.
A fairly routine storyline of good cop-good cop – just doin' their
jobs, ma'am, where Detective Matthews (Hans Hernke) is ushered into a case
involving a feisty yet missing girl, Rebecca (Vania Bezerra). He emits a soggy, magisterial type of
defense, due in part (maybe? Probably) to the new role he's accepted of training
his trusty other-half detective co-pilot, Detective Davis, played by a baby faced
Cameron Bigelow. The main problem with Hidden
Agenda is that it doesn't launch off with a solid plot point and it doesn't
end with one, either. Both A and B plots
fit fairly snug into each other but don't do anything extensive or prominent to
play off of each other.
To the dismay of Detective Matthews, this particular case is
too complex to handle from his office, so he must go out into the real world
and become his own eyes and ears in the field.
Coming to terms with his own agenda (his own... hidden agenda?) means
thrusting himself out of the comforts of his confine, really testing all of his
detective skills, yet exploring new sides to himself that slowly unravel as the
feisty (yet still kidnapped) Rebecca waits to be saved. As he races against time to solve the case
and “do some detective shit”, his world begins to run parallel.
To the film's credit, each character is a perfect poster
child for textbook emotion. The scenes
are shot cut and dry with little to no interpretation needed which actually
helps as a binding agent for the film's purpose – helping the viewer avoid
unnecessary conclusion-jumps which weren't there to begin with. The bad news: minimal character development
and a lackluster type of yarn that just barely starts to pick up as soon as it
ends. The good news: nothing is
permanent.
Like this? Please share.
Like this? Please share.
-Sarah Shafer