M Night Shyamalan is a director who has been considered the master of the twist in recent years. Alfred Hitchcock owned that moniker back in the 40s-60s. It’s a rarity that there are any good twists in films today, but the latest is a thriller called Detained, directed by Felipe Mucci and starring Abbie Cornish.

Rebecca (Abbie Cornish) is a woman who decides to go to a bar for a drink one night. She meets a man at the bar and the next thing you know she has been “Detained” by Detective Avery (Laz Alonzo, The Boys) and his partner Detective Moon (Moon Bloodgood) They are questioning Cornish’s character about an accident she got in while driving with the man from the bar. This situation is more complicated than this, and as the woman is being questioned longer and longer, she starts to figure out what’s truly going on here. 

Abbie Cornish is an actress that has done quite a bit from Sucker Punch to Limitless in her decade-or-so-long career. She’s even done some television in the streaming series Jack Ryan opposite John Krasinski. She has navigated Hollywood quite nicely.  She seems to pick projects where she can be a producer and have a say in what goes on in the final product of a film and/or television series. This has worked pretty well most of the time for her. I don’t think this was the right vehicle for her abilities, though. It drags and takes the spotlight away from her more often than not.

When I mentioned twist, I purposefully left out the film with one of if not the greatest twists of all time, and that’s “The Usual Suspects”. It’s a thirty-year-old film so I’m not ashamed to say what the twist is here but let’s just say Kevin Spacey’s character of Virbel Kent isn’t exactly who he says he is and by the end of the film you find that out. This film has a huge twist in the beginning and connects to the middle and end of the movie. It’s like they were trying to copy “The Usual Suspects” with less-than-good results. I love homage to other films, but this was pretty bad. I’m a huge fan of “The Usual Suspects”, and this movie didn’t come close to matching it at all.

There is a group of characters in this film led mostly by Cornish and Alonzo,  but they are there as small pieces to a larger puzzle. The supporting cast is a little more than Canon fodder, if you will. More often than not, they just say and do dumb stuff at the behest of the two main characters. The cat and mouse game the detectives, and Cornish’s characters are playing get old pretty quickly. By about the hour mark of this hour and a half film, I’m done with this story and its premise. This movie needed a better script, that’s for sure.

Laz Alonzo has gained a lot of fame over the past few years for portraying Mothers Milk in The Boys. In that series, he has a lot of stuff to do and great characters to work opposite of. Here, he has Cornish and a bunch of dumb idiots, not in real life but as their  characters in the film. He has to do a lot of heavy lifting in the movie. The script keeps his character busy from the moment he comes on screen. He’s just saddled with a bunch of amateurs. This film doesn’t do him justice at all, but I can see him making a career out of doing a lot of similar characters, but with a better script to work from.

Detained is a prime example of a movie that wants to be better than it actually is. It apes one of the best films of the last thirty or so years, but doesn’t even come close to it In tone or feel. The characters except for Cornish ‘s and Alonzo ‘s are terrible, and I couldn’t care less about any of them. The twist is pretty amateurish to be quite truthful. Overall, this was a waste of an hour and a half of my time. Cornish and Alonzo deserve better material than this, and so do audiences. 

1 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen