User Reviews

This is at least the third remake of this movie so if while watching it, there is a sense of deja vu, don't be surprised. All they did was change the setting of the story and tell it differently but the differences are not significant. And it doesn't get any better because the plot is flawed to begin with. It never works. And like its predecessors, the acting is mediocre.

The plot has a unique ending which will surprise any one who has never seen the movie before but the ending doesn't fit the story. Had this movie ended ten minutes earlier, it would have worked and have been very satisfying and I would have thought it more worthwhile. But here is the spoiler and that in the end crime does pay because the criminal is not caught. I never like this message resulting from a movie.

This may be the most confused movie I've ever watched. Not confusing. Confused. Dead Easy is morally bewildered, structurally befuddled, thematically perplexed and appears to be the result of taking one bad script and sticking a completely different bad script right in the middle of it. Add in actors playing all of their roles as if their characters suffered from some form of mental disease or defect, and you end up with a film that does not appear to have been made by human hands. If you told me co-writer/director Neal Sundstrom was a shaved gorilla that had a camera thrown into his cage one day and the result was this movie, I'd totally believe you.

Simon Storm (Richard Grieco) is an American ad executive living and working in South Africa. Well…that's what he's supposed to be. In reality, Simon Storm is Richard Grieco. I'm not sure Richard Grieco ever has or ever could play anything other than Richard Grieco and that's all he is in this film. Anyway, Storm has a wife, Teresa (Joanna Pacula), and a girlfriend, Kate (Thandi Puren). Teresa is a painter and Kate pretty much just wants Storm to leave his wife. When Storm finds out Teresa is cheating on him (and gets his ass kicked by his wife's boy toy), he finally decides to ask for a divorce. But Teresa has a video tape of Storm screwing Kate and tells him she'll never let him go. Apparently, there's no such thing as no-fault divorce in South Africa.

Kate tells Storm they should just kill Teresa. She even looks up an old acquaintance named Lloyd (Langley Kirkwood) to do the job. But Storm gets drunk and calls up a weirdly trollish private eye name Strathman (Russel Savadier) to kill his wife. He immediately regrets it in the morning and tries to call off the hit. Storm is apparently too late and now Strathman wants to be paid the $250 thousand promised him. Then it turns out Strathman is actually a serial killer who's only abducted Teresa and he freaks out when Kate doesn't give him the entire $250 thousand dollars. At this point, police captain Bud Klein (Ron Smerczak) gets involved. He's apparently the South African version of Fred Dryer from the old TV show Hunter. Klein has been investigating Stratham's other murders and eventually rescues Teresa.

At this point, Storm decides he really loves Teresa and wants to make their marriage work. That provokes Kate into turning to Lloyd again to kill Teresa. But then Teresa seduces Lloyd and makes him a better offer, which FINALLY leads to a conclusion that couldn't make less sense if it involved a singing elephant and a catfish that has a master's degree in early English basket weaving.

The only pleasing things about Dead Easy are a couple of brief glimpses of Thandi Puren's lovely breasts. That accounts for less than 4 seconds of screen time. The rest of this film is like sitting in a sauna with 37 smelly Hungarians while getting hit in the face with a handful of wet noodles.

Richard Grieco is…well, he's Richard Grieco. His every line of dialog is spoken in a stage whisper, even when he's shouting. The only actual acting he does is to toss his luxurious black mane from side to side. His entire time on screen, he seems to be caught in a bout of mental depression. For all that, though, he's still kind of fascinating to look at. I'm not sure when it happened, but Richard Grieco has become the "before picture" to Mickey Rourke's "after". It's like Rourke is the portrait Grieco had hidden up in his attic that somehow got loose, began walking around and started its own acting career.

The rest of the cast ranges from mediocre to "learned how to act by going to comedy traffic school". Co-writer/director Sundstrom also demonstrates that he doesn't know how to start or end a scene. I mean, the middle of all his scenes suck as well, but it's like he turns the camera on, waits for the actors to wander into view and then forgets to turn the camera off after the actors walk away. He also jams a lot of odd, throwaway moments into the script, like a rough-and-tumble cop slapping a male stripper on the ass and having characters repeatedly rave about the incredible beauty of Teresa Storm. Which is strange, because Joanna Pacula looks more like a middle-aged librarian on vacation.

Probably the most striking thing about Dead Easy is how the story is completely unconcerned with giving the audience any characters they can like or empathize with. Storm is played by Richard Grieco, so he's got a vaguely douchey quality to start with. You quickly find out he's cheating on his wife, so he's a jerk as well. Then he proceeds to be pushed around by every other character in the movie, so he's kind of pussy. Teresa is cheating on Storm, so she's a bitch. Kate is a jealous and demanding shrew. Captain Bud Klein is a smirking jackass. These are all fairly offensive people.

Dead Easy is even junk on a purely technical level, with one scene having such bad sound quality it sounds like it was recorded with two tin cans and a string. And with virtually no nudity and not much more violence, I can't think of any reason anyone should ever view this film. Staring at your microwave while it pops a bag of popcorn would be more entertaining than watching Dead Easy.

The puzzle being... who were we supposed to like? I watched it to see Richard Grieco (who I agree is underrated), and through the movie, it was possible to see his character growing and changing and improving, trying to do better. Learning a lesson, if you will, or starting to. That made him about the only likable person in the film apart from the police detective, who initially was too over-the-top falsely jovial for my tastes. Another reviewer commented on the twist at the end, and I agree: while interesting, it doesn't fit the plot. I sat afterward thinking it through and decided that what happened is that the writers/directors came up with the twist on the last day of filming, over a lunch with too many cocktails. The movie is atmospheric, however, and watching the characters 'play' each other, especially once you suspect what's really going on, is interesting. One thing I did find unbelievable -- and this isn't really a spoiler because it takes place in the first three minutes -- is that Grieco, a rich & powerful man, would ALLOW his girlfriend to film their liaison. I thought, DUH? Aren't you too smart for that? C'mon, dude, it's the age of the Internet. Trust no one, as Fox Mulder would have said. In any case, if you're a Grieco fan, give this one a shot. He's purty and he does a good job.