When a film ends up on my radar that has no one that I have ever heard of in it as well as a director I haven't heard of, yet is has a 6 out of 10 or higher rating, I feel as though it is a bit of a coin toss about whether or not it is going to be worth watching.
While the premise behind this film and the overall message is kind of good, there is a ton of completely implausible aspects to this film that kind of make it tough to get behind. However, if you can look past these glaring differences between what happens in this film and the actual world we live in, the message of this film is good enough to watch the entire thing.
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The name Nick Stahl seems familiar to me although I can't say why. He plays the lead role of Ryan, who is an extremely talented chef who is just down on his luck and decides for reasons that we are not shown, to go and visit his distant ex-roommate who is extremely successful and wealthy. He flies to a Latin American country that is not named to a luxurious villa to visit his friend named Jack. Jack lives a life of opulence and has a ton of money whereas Ryan, who is actually a better chef than him, has almost no money to speak of. It is eluded to that Ryan has a gambling problem and this is the root of his issues.
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Jack is really vague about why it is that he is flown all over the world to cook single meals for wealthy people and doesn't seem to really want to tell Ryan the full details of what it is exactly that he does. Ryan can't make any sense of why his very successful friend who gets flown first-class around the world to cook single meals for groups of ultra-wealthy people would be as depressed as Jack appears to be. Ryan goads him a bit telling him that he is ungrateful for the luck that he has had in life. But then, something happens and Jack is unable to do the performance meal-prep and Ryan, seeing an opportunity to get a leg into this industry, decides to impersonate his friend, who he kind of looks enough like to pull off actually being him. Since it is shown to us in the film that Ryan is actually better at the job than Jack, Ryan seeks to become part of this exclusive group that Jack up to this point has basically refused to tell him about.
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I'm intentionally being vague here just like the friend, Jack was, in the film because to tell you any more would be to spoil what it is about this movie that makes it worthwhile.
This film could have been excellent but to me at least, there are a lot of things holding it back. Poor acting for one thing as well as some pretty terrible dialogue at times. Also, the security of this group of elite group of ultra-wealthy people is extremely ineffective when the story conveniently calls for it to be. The mansion that they are in is surrounded by hired security, but a random girl who is somewhat important to a particular part of the plot progression drives right past all of them somehow. It isn't explained at all how she is just all of a sudden there when all other people in the community would have been prevented from doing so. Also, at one point Ryan phones up Jack's credit card company to gain access to his finances only to encounter the same security precautions that all of us would experience if we were to call a bank. Only, he is able to get the answers to a lot of questions simply by claiming he was in a bad accident (which isn't true) and the person on the other end of the phone is more than happy to help him circumnavigate the security. The entire sequence was really stupid and not at all what dealing with a financial institution would actually be like.
There are many other situations that do not at all reflect how a real life version of the same situation would be but I can't get into them without accidentally revealing a major part of what makes this film better-than-average. If you do decide to watch this mystery/thriller film, let's see how many of them you can spot while it is going on, ok?
Should I watch it?
Lol, I spent all that time being vague about what happens to the real Jack and they straight up tell you in the trailer. Well if you watched the trailer then you already know but I am still not going to put it in my writeup for the sake of people that enjoy going into a film completely blind. It surprised me and if you don't watch that trailer it may end up surprising you as well.
This movie in my mind is kind of like western film studios attempting to copy some of the really creepy elements that make Korean thrillers some of the best movies in the world. They don't do as good of a job at it as the Koreans do, but they come pretty close. Therefore, despite the rather annoying plot holes and annoyances such as a relatively bad script as far as dialogue is concerned, this one is something that I think is worth watching for people that enjoy a bit of creepiness and well as a story that isn't just a cookie-cutter version of the same old thing.
I can't find anywhere that is legally streaming this, but you can legally rent it for a small fee at Fandango, AppleTV+ as well as Amazon Prime