Tell Tale (2009)

This movie is a very loose re-imagining of the Edgar Allen Poe story the Tell Tale heart.  And I do mean very loose because basically other than a heart being involved and it beating loudly that is all the stories have in common. Josh Lucas plays a man named Terry.  In addition to having a daughter that is suffering from a rare disease he has a bad heart.  The movie starts off with him getting a donor heart to save his life.  But as strange things begin to happen to him Terry finds out that he received the heart of a man that was murdered.  The dead man is using Terry to get his revenge on those that killed him and his wife.  Most of the movie is Terry running into the men that killed the donor and getting revenge, all while romancing a beautiful doctor (played by Lena Headey), taking care of his daughter, and dodging a cop (Brian Cox) that knows more than he lets on. 

Wow this is a hard review for me to write.  Basically I think that Tell Tale is an okay movie, but nothing special.  This makes for a difficult review because I honestly have nothing to say good or bad about the movie!  But I suppose I should try.  The story has potential, but the movie just never seems to get started.  The pacing of the movie was good enough to hold my attention, but I kept waiting for it to really get going and show me something.  It just never does.  Also the ending is really unsatisfying.  I think this is partly because the “villains” aren’t fleshed out at all, with the last two at the end having very little screen time to get established.  The best character in the movie (and that isn’t saying much) is the Brian Cox character that has a disappointing and anticlimactic fate.  The only good thing I can say about the movie is the last minute or so where there is a bit of a twist that I have to say was pretty cool. 

One of the most frustrating things about this movie is how an otherwise good cast is wasted. Brian Cox, Lena Headey, and Josh Lucas are all pretty solid actors, but are given nothing to work with here.  And again the best character in the movie has to be Cox’s.  I don’t think that it is any surprise that he is also the only member of the cast that I think can rise above or perhaps make a movie better than it should be.  Even he can’t make this thing rise above it’s mediocrity. 

I wanted to talk a bit about the special effects.  Other than a pretty nasty stomping in parking garage and a scalpel to the neck towards the end the kills in Tell Tale are pretty tame.  There is some implied stuff in a bath tub that happens off screen that had me cringing a bit, which ought to tell you have well it was executed, but again not much to make the movie memorable.  I’d also say that the editing, sound, and camerawork are all also in that competent, but not memorable category like the story and cast. 

See the theme that is coming?  There is nothing terribly wrong or right about Tell Tale.  So in the end you have a movie that might be interesting to watch once, but won’t warrant a second look.  At most I’d say rent this one or possibly wait for it to hit the 3-dollar bin (shouldn’t take long).

2 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2010 John Shatzer