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With the recent controversy over domestic violence involving several US National Football League (NFL) players that has both gripped and shocked America, No Good Deed could not have been released at a more topical time.
For those who don’t follow hand-egg (also known as American Football), it came under the spotlight last week when Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens was caught on camera beating his wife unconscious in a casino elevator. Although fired by the team and suspended indefinitely from the NFL, questions are abound as to why it took so long and a blind-eye was turned when the NFL received the tape back in April.
Furthermore, since this case came to light, further accusations of domestic abuse have emerged, such as Minnesota Vikings player Adrian Peterson who was arrested and charged with child abuse after ‘disciplining’ his four-year-old child with a tree branch.
It is under this context that I chose to watch No Good Deed this week. The plot revolves around the vicious and brutal ex-con Colin Evans (Elba) who has a history of terrorising women. I was hoping for both an intelligent introspective of what makes such a man tick and a film which poses various moral and philosophical questions. Unfortunately, the film bypasses these for the most part in order to deliver a brisk, yet admittedly very watchable, home invasion thriller.
Opening with Evans being denied parole five years into a manslaughter sentence after killing a man and five women, he escapes from his prison van by shooting his guard and driver. He travels to Atlanta, Georgia and stalks a woman named Alexis, whom, incidentally, was his fiancée before he was jailed.
He brutally murders her after confronting her with evidence that she was unfaithful during his prison sentence, and after hastily fleeing the scene in a van, he winds up crashing and calling at the nearest house in search of a truck.
The house belongs to Terri (Henson) and her two young children, along with Terri’s best friend Meg who is visiting for the evening. What follows is a game of manipulation as Evans tries to charm his way into the house while the others quickly learn that he is not as friendly as he first appears.
I’ll get the bad news out of the way first. This film could have been so much more than it was; I walked out of the cinema with a strong sense that there was something meaningful hidden, but it missed too many tricks to come out.
My least favourite genre of films is horror, unless it’s of the psychological kind like Silence of the Lambs or Alien. I felt that the plot and whole setup of the movie could really have worked if it took this angle, but showing Evans brutally murdering his ex and obviously marked as ‘the bad guy’ from the opening frames meant that there was little suspense or atmosphere when he showed up at Terri’s house.
It would have been much better if the film began with him knocking on her door and the audience was left in the dark about his true intentions. Seeing his character develop psychologically as he started to play mental tricks on his victims would have worked much better as a premise.
Another strange creative decision was to cast Elba, who unfortunately never manages to break the shackles of being a stereotypically brutal and misogynistic man, an overused archetype in cinema that belongs 50 years in the past. On a more personal level, his performance is never quite seductive or menacing enough to match the emotional spectrum the film needed, and as a Brit, his adopted American accent is scratchy at best.
On the positive side, if you take the film at face value as a home invasion thriller, it’s definitely watchable. It’s very brisk running time leads to the feeling of panic and urgency on-screen relaying to the viewer, as the pace never relinquishes and events flow with a smooth continuity.
Henson also plays her character well, with her strength to stand defiant in the face of the terror that has threatened her family and providing a focal point for the theme of female empowerment that runs through the film.
On a higher level, the film’s violence never feels gratuitous or like an excuse to put a mature rating on it, but rather as a part of a larger commentary on domestic violence. There’s even a disturbing scene early on when a prison guard apathetically remarks to Evans that his five female murders was simply due to ‘women trouble’, which emphasises how misogyny in society is rifer than we’d like to believe.
In essence then, No Good Deed manages to say something about domestic violence and is particularly topical where recent events are concerned.
However, there’s a nagging sense that it could have been a whole lot more and wasted a great opportunity to explore the psychological triggers that lead dominating males to commit the crimes they do.
* Showing in Cineco, Seef I, Seef II
