Producers: John Caglione Jr. and Stevan Mena   Director: Stevan Mena   Screenplay: Stevan Mena   Cast:  Veronica Cartwright, Madelyn Dundon, Michael Steger, Michael Bakkensen, T.C. Carter, Nicola Silber, Drew Moerlein, Kayleigh Ruller, Janet Lopez and Vincent Butta   Distributor: Seismic Releasing

Grade: D

In a way the title of Stevan Mena’s movie (which he edited and wrote the music for, in addition to writing and directing it), is an example of truth in advertising: it purports to be a thriller, but that’s a ruse: it’s so ponderously paced and clumsily constructed that it engenders zero suspense or tension.  It does have a lot of twists, though—so many, in fact, that in the end it takes a good twenty minutes of laborious explanation by a third-rate Columbo (Michael Bakkensen as a detective named Burke), complete with flashbacks and periodic objections from the villain, to unravel the preposterously convoluted scheme, and the motivations behind it, that drive the plot.  Any viewer who’s stuck it out until then will be either exhausted, incredulous, or both.

The setting is a big old house on a remote slice of the Maine coast, owned by Olivia (Veronica Cartwright), a composer and orchestral conductor who’s widowed and suffering from dementia that involves periods of lucidity alternating with others of confusion and anger, as well as COPD, which mostly confines her to bed and an oxygen mask.  Her condition requires a live-in caregiver, and in a prologue we meet the latest of them, Tracy (Kayleigh Ruller), who’s insisting over the phone to her supervisor Ed (Vincent Butta) that he needs to send a replacement.  She’s terrified by noises in the house and believes herself in danger.  After she hangs up, she turns toward the camera and screams, leaving a suggestion that something supernatural might be afoot.

Cut to Dale (Madelyn Dundon) in the city, living with her boyfriend Ben (Drew Moerlein).  A nurse who’s been put on leave for an incident in which a patient died in her care, she’s called by Ed to earn her job back by stepping in for Tracy.  Despite Ben’s reluctance to see her go, she drives up the coast to Olivia’s house.  But she’s greeted not by Tracy, who’s simply disappeared, but by Tom (Michael Steger), the solicitous neighbor who found Olivia all alone.  A widower with a young daughter named Penny (Nicola Silber), he shows Dale around and gives her his number should she need help.

Dale’s interactions with Olivia vary wildly.  Sometimes the woman berates her, but at others has nice conversations with her.  Dale is a bit unsettled by her insistence that the ghost of her husband occasionally walks the halls, and by the bumps and squeaks that occur in the old place (who—or what—made that painting hang crooked?), but the real problems are the few people she deals with.  Tom is pleasant but kind of shifty, Penny seems withdrawn, and Jacob (T.C. Carter), the deliveryman, is positively weird, claiming that Tom has it in for him while trying to get close to Dale himself.  It’s not long before Dale is as nervous as Tracy had been, and her concerns about her predecessor’s fate—and her own—grow.  It’s not long before she’s asking Ed for a replacement, too, and eventually Alice (Janet Lopez) will show up to take over the caretaking job.

By then, however, things have gone totally off the rails, and it’s been a long time coming.  Red herrings abound, suspects are indicated, dropped in favor of others and then brought back for renewed consideration, and finally after misdirection after misdirection—as well as a messy climactic attack—Burke, who’s appeared up until then an officious dweeb, shows up to explain everything in that protracted speech, in which facts previously unknown are suddenly sprung on viewers out of the blue.  Turns out he’s been a dutiful shamus all along.

Cartwright, who has a résumé stretching back to when she was a kid, does her best to salvage her scenes, but it’s a losing effort.  The rest of the cast veers from pallid (Dundon, Bakkensen) to way over-the-top (Carter), but it would be pointless to beat up on any of them; the material is hopeless, and that’s that.  The tech crew—production designer Jack Ryan, cinematographer Cory Geryak—do adequate work, and the Maine location is attractive enough.  But as editor Mena is too protective of his script, allowing it to unfold lethargically; and his score is generic.

The message: don’t be taken in by this “Ruse.”

Producers: Danny A. Abeckaser, Kyle Stefanski and Gustavo Nascimento   Director: Danny A. Abeckaser   Screenplay: Kosta Kondilopoulos   Cast: David Arquette, Jeremy Luke, Danny A. Abeckaser, Bo Dietl, Joseph Russo, Graham Sibley, Nathaniel Buzolic, Deborah Geffner, Lynn Adrianna Freedman and Kevin Connolly   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: D

Though it’s based on a true story of corruption in the New York City police department (related in a 2006 book by Greg B. Smith, here adapted by Kosta Kondilopoulos), Danny A. Abeckaser’s “Mob Cops” is so riddled with heavy-handed stereotyping and terrible dialogue that it often comes across like a parody of the genre exemplified at its best in “The Sopranos” and the films of Martin Scorsese.  But the over-the-top treatment doesn’t appear to be intentionally funny; it’s just absurdly serious.

The most egregious example of the approach is in the ultra-hammy performance of Jeremy Luke as Leo Benetti, one of two NYC detectives who effectively become paid hit-men for a Mafia honcho (Bo Dietl); the other is Sammy Canzano (David Arquette), who doggedly puts up with the recklessness and ranting of his partner.  (The cops’ actual names were Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa; the names of other characters are altered as well.)

The pair’s nefarious activities have been going on for a long while when straight-arrow cop Tim Delgado (producer-director Danny A. Abeckaser) is asked by a family friend (Deborah Geffner) to look into the disappearance of her son, who was involved in bad stuff but, she argues, didn’t deserve to be rubbed out.  Tim and his partner (Nathaniel Buzolic) doggedly investigate, uncovering lots of tidbits about Canzano and Benetti, but it’s not until they interview incarcerated mob boss Galiano (Joseph Russo), who happily talks about his own biggest hits, that they get a line on all the bloody business the dirty cops have been involved in, and profited from.  Lots of flashbacks, and restroom breaks, punctuate his monologues.  

Still it’s not enough to get their boss (Kevin Connolly, in what amounts to a cameo) to authorize an arrest until Benetti writes a book about his exploits and is stupid enough to wax eloquent to a purported Hollywood producer in the hope of securing a movie deal.  That finally induces the boss to act.             

Apart from Russo’s extended riffs, it’s Luke who dominates the movie by sheer wacky bravado; by contrast Arquette spends most of his time trying to appear pained at his partner’s excesses—Benetti always seems on the verge of an apoplectic seizure—but he just winds up looking mildly constipated.  No one else makes much of an impression, especially Abeckaser, who’s as bland as they come.  If one’s being kind, one might speculate that he was too busy with other duties, like scraping together a budget, to devote much effort to his performance.  But he might have asked Kondilopoulos to tone down the script’s endless stream of “gritty” profanity and smooth out the action, which has a tendency to jump around chronologically and insert extraneous material—like brief scenes of the principals with their wives—that must have driven editor Steve Ansell up the wall.  At least his jerky, ragged work suggests that was the case.

But then, this looks as though it was a catch-as-catch can production, using actual New York locations (probably without official permission), which also would explain why the sets, costumes, and Barry Markowitz’s camerawork emphasize darkness and grit over clarity, though there are moments (restaurant interiors, a few kill sequences) that aim for some style; the outdoor scenes at the car lot where Benetti winds up working, by contrast, are so bright they’re barely watchable.  Ansell has trimmed the footage down to less than ninety minutes, though, which has to be counted as a blessing.  Lionel Cohen’s score barely registers.

There are times when a movie’s scrappiness turns out to be a virtue, forcing filmmakers to overcome the limitations imposed by their meager resources with sheer imagination.  This isn’t one of them: “Mob Cops” is cheap, looks it and plays like it.  If one could never term it a guilty pleasure, however, it does at least afford one the opportunity to laugh over Luke’s attempt at a performance of Falstaffian proportions.  But most viewers will think that an insufficient return for their time, and conclude that in this case you’d reach the proper description of the movie by removing the initial letter from “scrappy.”