Elizabeth Hurley had a time in her career when she was a hot thing. She starred opposite Mike Meyers in the Austin Powers Trilogy which was the big role most people remember her from. She’s been in Bedazzled but her career has taken the upswing she or fans have hoped for. Doing a trilogy of straight-to-television Christmas movies didn’t help her much. Her latest film an erotic thriller, Strictly Confidential, isn’t going to do anything to help her career either.  It’s quite honestly one of the worst films I’ve seen this year.

Mia (Georgia Lock) returns to the island, a year later, because she lost a close friend the year before, Rebecca (Lauren McQueen) What she finds when she gets there are a bunch of lies and deceit.  Lily (Elizabeth Hurley) the mother of the deceased girl welcomes her back, but she and the others that were invited to come back are all holding secrets which convinces Mia to investigate her friend’s death a lot closer. What she finds is shocking.

Damian Hurley, the son of Elizabeth Hurley, has some abilities as a director. The look of the film is very good. His cinematographer lights and films this movie very well. That’s obviously from his direction. The problem is the look of the film isn’t everything. He has a major issue directing actors. The actors I mentioned already and the ones I haven’t are all delivering their lines like pieces of wood. These are some of the most wooden performances I’ve ever seen. He needs to get better at this as a director. 

One other major problem that goes hand in hand with the wooden performances is the bad script. This script is straight out of a soap opera. The dialogue is so bad it’s funny. I couldn’t help but laugh even though many scenes are meant to be very dramatic. There are so many scenes straight out of a bad soap opera it just took me completely out of the film if you call it that. It’s more of a two-hour soap opera than a movie to me. I’m sure that others who watch it will feel the same way.

Other than Elizabeth Hurley I’m not that familiar with the other actors in the movie. Maybe if I’ve known these people better I would feel more confident in their overall performances. They just didn’t register with me, so for that I can’t get behind most of their performances. I’m sure if these actors were given better direction they would have given better performances. Unfortunately for them, they failed in making me care about them at all. It’s sad because I never want to dislike a film for whatever reason. This isn’t a good film because the performances aren’t very good.

This is a twist in the story and the plot suffers from this quite a bit. The twist comes in the third act and it just doesn’t make any sense. The film deals with the tragedy of the Rebecca character throughout the movie and the twist completely throws the credit it has gained in the first two acts. The twist ruins what is already not a very good film, and makes it worse than it already was. It’s one of the worst twists I’ve ever seen and goes right into the soap opera aspect I already mentioned.

Strictly Confidential is a terrible movie. It relies on so many things that aren’t very good. The first is a cast of unknowns except for Elizabeth Hurley the mother of the director, which is not very good in this film at all. The second thing that isn’t very good is the script that the actors have to use to give their performances. It’s a terrible script that has an even worse twist. That twist is the straw that broke the camel’s back regarding how bad this movie ended up being. This is the worst film I’ve seen all year so far despite the beautiful look. I can’t say it’s good because of that because it is not.

1 star

Dan Skip Allen