Messages Deleted (2010)

Perfect cast and a good story

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Joel Brandt (Matthew Lillard) is an efficient screen writing professor in the university but has never succeeded as a screenwriter. When Brandt receives a weird phone call asking for help, he believes that it is a prank of his best friend Adam Brickles (Michael Eklund) and he deletes the message. When he is having a conversation with his girlfriend Claire (Chiara Zanni) on the sidewalk of a bar, the body of the caller falls off a building in front of them on the sidewalk. Brandt tells to the Detective Lavery (Deborah Kara Unger) and Detective Breedlove (Serge Houde) that are in charge of the investigation about the call that he had received and he becomes a suspect.When he receives another mysterious call from a woman also calling for help in his answering machine, he goes to the location and finds that she is dead. Brandt becomes the prime-suspect of Detectives Lavery and Breedlove when they find that the message was deleted from his answering machine. When Brandt discovers that the killer is following the only screenplay that he had sold to the cinema industry, "Senseless Killing", he tries to guess the next move of the serial-killer."Messages Deleted" is a senseless, annoying and absurd thriller about a screenwriter that is informed about murders that are following a screenplay that he had written stolen the idea from another screenplay.Joel Brandt is irritating, hysterical, clumsy and imbecile, and takes all the possible wrong attitudes along the story. The plot is based on deleted messages in times when it is possible to have traceability of phone calls, technical means to retrieve a deleted message and surveillance (bugging) a phone number. The stupid open conclusion is never clear but the worst is the use of the word "cliché" along the story. The writer had the intention of making a cult-movie but unfortunately he has totally failed. My vote is one (awful).Title (Brazil): "Mensagens Deletadas" ("Deleted Messages")

A movie that starts off with a mockery of clichés and then goes on to show that it contains each one of them. There is blood, there is a workaholic cop, a struggling professional in a dysfunctional relationship who realizes he cares for his girl in the moment of crisis, the prodigal protégé' and a "twist" that could be spotted from the moon. I had narrowed down on the eventual villain 20 mins into the movie, and so will you. Performances are forgettable, a very lame and unconvincing attempt by the actors to show sexual tension between their respective characters, and its as if death, even of your loved ones, can be forgotten in a matter of minutes. I am not even writing this review properly, coz seriously, even trashing this movie seems like a waste of time. You wanna stay away from this one, trust me.

Intriguing premise that takes a while to introduce itself to the viewer, once it does you find yourself interested to the point of staying in the room, however this soon changes as you begin to unravel the plot roughly 50 minutes before any of the characters become even close. It is another one of those 'thrillers' that does not thrill, the ones where the characters make inhuman, illogical decisions that are ridiculous to the point of shouting at the screen. On the more technical side, I found the camera angles annoying and distracting during several scenes at the beginning (as if the camera man is playing around with techniques they've only just picked up), it involves lots of people walking through the shot in front of characters in dialogue and bizarre instruments that automatically stop producing sound when not in shot. In summary this movie is infuriating with few redeeming features. It tries to be clever but fails miserably. Not worth watching.

What do you get if you cross several average actors,a 'witty' self-aware, self deprecating script and a bag full of clichés,acknowledged as being clichés by the script,making them super clichés?Robbed of an hour and a half,that's what.I've seen some bad films and often you can take the good from them and be pretty content.This film in no way offers anything even remotely close to redemption.....actually that's not entirely fair,it does.It ends.This movie should be used in a court of law to substantiate and complete the argument for euthanasia.Sticking to the old adage about ending positively I did take something from this film......I learnt never to go anywhere near any future project with anyones name attached from these credits.One star is the minimum I'm able to give this,but it's a little like saying that Hitler was just a bit naughty.