Main cast: Bailee Madison (Chloe Albright), Jerry O’Connell (The Coroner), Anthony Turpel (TJ Albright), Chris Butler (Sheriff Dugan), Chris Lee (Ross), Jorge Luis-Pallo (Mannix), Sterling Beaumon (Deputy Farmer), and Kyler O’Neal (Randy)
Director: Patrick Lussier
Chloe and TJ Albright are in a tight bind in Play Dead.
Their father was ruled to have committed suicide, so the insurance company isn’t paying up. He left behind a pile of bills that need to be paid, and their house is being foreclosed. Chloe’s student loan has also been suspended because of non-payment.
Since this isn’t a romantic comedy, there will be no hot billionaire in sight to fall for Chloe. Therefore, her younger brother TJ decides, behind her back, to join Chloe’s ex, Ross, to rob a store for the money to pay the bank.
The whole attempted robbery goes wrong, as Ross has a toy gun but the store owner is all about the Second Amendment. TJ manages to escape and he thinks he has his tracks covered… until he remembers that all their chatter discussing the robbery is on Ross’s phone. Oops.
Chloe is like, seriously, who plans a robbery via the phone. She should have been the one planning the robbery, I tell you.
Never fear. Chloe, a second-year forensic medical student, has a plan. In this small town, every dead body is sent to the morgue first for “processing”, so Ross’s phone will be locked away in the evidence room of that place. So, she will use her medical school woo-woo to fake an overdose and be sent to the same morgue that Ross’s carcass is sent to, and she will then collect Ross’s phone. Voila!
Seriously, she should have just planned to rob a bank from the start, and unlike her ex and TJ, she may just pull that one off.
Alas, nobody has accounted for the fact that the coroner may, in fact, be part of a ring that harvest organs and sell them off—illegally, of course—and he’s not happy that Bailee have stumbled upon his side business…
About this film, I think I’d like it much better if it hadn’t turned into some violent cartoon about the mid-point.
It has a lot of things going for it. A creepy set perfect for cat and mouse chases, Jerry O’Connell putting on an excellent menacing front as a truly chilling villain, and Bailee Madison is good as the lead heroine that is both strong and yet out of her depths.
However, the movie piles on increasingly implausible moments until the whole thing turns into a cartoon. I can wave away a few bad science here and there, but it gets absurd when people that are dead suddenly aren’t, the heroine gets powers to channel electricity to electrocute someone without hurting herself, and so forth. What is this, a cartoon for grown-ups?
What started out as a compelling thriller, as a result, ends up being a wacky over the top absurd-o-rama. There are obvious signs that the movie is aware of how absurd it is in its second half, but it’s hard to reconcile the more serious tone of the first half with the wacky nonsense of the second half. It’s as if the movie popped acid at the midpoint and went all out loony on everyone!
Still, I can’t deny that the whole thing has its moments, even if it’s like two different films glued together. While this one isn’t what I’d consider a great movie, it can be entertaining, so I guess that counts for something.
