Messages Deleted

MESSAGES DELETED (2009) - Sept. 28, 2009
A surprisingly shoddy film about screenwriting teacher who gets a couple of messages from murder victims just before they are killed, and soon finds himself the prime suspect for their murders. Everything about this film feels ridiculously low-rent, from Rob Cowan's bland, downright incompetent direction (which is a big reason that this film doesn't work -- a lot of sequences that are clearly meant to be suspenseful or exciting just fall completely flat) to the score to the second-rate performances (even Matthew Lilard, who I like, did his best but was clearly miscast as a leading man type). It's surprising, given that it was written by Larry Cohen, who recently wrote the above average thrillers Cellular and Phone Booth -- this probably would have been quite a bit better with a better director and slightly higher production values, but it still wouldn't have been on the level of those two films. Oh well. *1/2