Alright, now, Larry Cohen's writing has always been hit-or-miss for me. I liked his "Maniac Cop" series, "It's Alive", "Phone Booth", and even "The Stuff" and "Uncle Sam", but for every enjoyable script he produces, there seems to be an equally awful follow-up, like "Captivity", or, well, this one.
The huge problem with "Messages Deleted" is how extremely desperate it is to come off as hip. It's laden with postmodern, self-aware babble about movie staples, story structure, clichés and so on. The main character writes screenplays and teaches scriptwriting in college; a fact that he won't *ever* shut up about. There is a tiny bit of character depth attempted when we see a few scenes of him caring for his demented father and being confronted with some sort of vaguely haunting past, but that's all ditched soon enough in favor of an endless stream of "I KNOW A LOT ABOUT STORYTELLING IN MOVIES! HEAR ME MAKE REFERENCES TO IT AND APPLY MOVIE ANALYSIS TO REAL LIFE!". Excuse the all-caps, but I'm trying to convey just how utterly annoying it is to listen to this gimmicky dialogue all the time, when it's neither natural, nor particularly insightful.
Regarding the storyline, all I can say is that for a movie that's so smugly obsessed with pointing the finger at "clichés" every chance it gets, it sure fails to steer clear of them itself. The whole thing is so bland, so mediocre, so utterly conventional that its self-aware pretense and attempted cleverer-than-thou attitude consistently fall flat. Even the core premise of a killer acting out a script is old and unimaginative. Not that it couldn't have been done well, but it's still a contributing factor to making this movie seem nowhere near as fresh as it wants to perceived.
Now, after all this misery, there's certainly a bit of salvageable material here. With the exception of Millie and Adam, all the characters are brought to life by pretty skilled actors. Matthew Lillard does a decent job walking the line between "I'm playing a serious character!" and "I'm friggin' Matthew Lillard!", and I always enjoy seeing a bit of Serge Houde, although he's merely the token douchebag cop in this one. Cinematography and editing are also competent enough, in my opinion, to elevate this movie from sub-par to average, but that's really as far as I'm willing to go.
In closing, "Messages Deleted" is a movie that's consistently stuck in an uncomfortable rut between making trite and often forced observations about the predictability of thriller movies, and conforming to those very conventions that make thriller movies predictable to begin with.
The huge problem with "Messages Deleted" is how extremely desperate it is to come off as hip. It's laden with postmodern, self-aware babble about movie staples, story structure, clichés and so on. The main character writes screenplays and teaches scriptwriting in college; a fact that he won't *ever* shut up about. There is a tiny bit of character depth attempted when we see a few scenes of him caring for his demented father and being confronted with some sort of vaguely haunting past, but that's all ditched soon enough in favor of an endless stream of "I KNOW A LOT ABOUT STORYTELLING IN MOVIES! HEAR ME MAKE REFERENCES TO IT AND APPLY MOVIE ANALYSIS TO REAL LIFE!". Excuse the all-caps, but I'm trying to convey just how utterly annoying it is to listen to this gimmicky dialogue all the time, when it's neither natural, nor particularly insightful.
Regarding the storyline, all I can say is that for a movie that's so smugly obsessed with pointing the finger at "clichés" every chance it gets, it sure fails to steer clear of them itself. The whole thing is so bland, so mediocre, so utterly conventional that its self-aware pretense and attempted cleverer-than-thou attitude consistently fall flat. Even the core premise of a killer acting out a script is old and unimaginative. Not that it couldn't have been done well, but it's still a contributing factor to making this movie seem nowhere near as fresh as it wants to perceived.
Now, after all this misery, there's certainly a bit of salvageable material here. With the exception of Millie and Adam, all the characters are brought to life by pretty skilled actors. Matthew Lillard does a decent job walking the line between "I'm playing a serious character!" and "I'm friggin' Matthew Lillard!", and I always enjoy seeing a bit of Serge Houde, although he's merely the token douchebag cop in this one. Cinematography and editing are also competent enough, in my opinion, to elevate this movie from sub-par to average, but that's really as far as I'm willing to go.
In closing, "Messages Deleted" is a movie that's consistently stuck in an uncomfortable rut between making trite and often forced observations about the predictability of thriller movies, and conforming to those very conventions that make thriller movies predictable to begin with.