movies

Good golly, Bad Detectives (2021) is so bad I’m just going to admit it—I was fooled.

Fooled by the awesome movie title and poster. But there is very little good about this movie, other than the premise.

It’s about two very different granddaughters who inherit their grandfather’s private detective agency. The conceit? They’re lousy detectives. Now, I would love to see a movie about two 20-something bad girls behaving badly and doing detective work even more badly. Maybe someday, if I’m lucky, I’ll see a movie like that. But this is not it.

The only good thing about Bad Detectives—aside from the premise—is the lighting. Great lighting. So much in this movie just glows, and that’s an attractive thing to see. But everything else? It’s horrible. Where do I even start?

First off, the characters. They’re a doozy. We have two women who are supposedly in conflict. One is apparently a former military vet, though she looks like she just graduated from high school. The other? Her only personality trait is that she’s Chinese. For real, I don’t know anything else about her. And neither does the movie. One character even says, “You should go back to an office job,” and you can tell the script struggled with what to call that job because they don’t even know what she’s all about.

Their grandfathers are dead, and despite their supposed differences, they have to put aside their conflicts and find out who killed them. However… there’s very little conflict between these two. Most of the time, they’re just drinking, staring into bottles of booze, and inexplicably flirting with each other.

And on that last point—at first, I thought I was going crazy. My wife always accuses me of seeing things in movies that aren’t there, especially when it comes to romantic or sexual tension. And for most of the movie, I was thinking, “Nah, these girls are just buddies.”

But my god, the lesbian tension in this film is thick. You could practically cut it with a knife. These two are always standing way too close, deep in each other’s eyes, all up in each other’s body space. There’s even a scene where they get incredibly handsy, and their friskiness results in one of their grandfather’s urns crashing to the floor, ashes spilling everywhere. This should be the moment where their relationship goes to the next level—if this were a well-written movie. But no.

This film could have had the courage to develop a tender lesbian love story, but instead, it took the coward’s way out and just left them as… friends. Friends? I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they can be friends. And I’m not just bitter that the plot didn’t go the direction I wanted. I’m mad because if you’re going to make them just buddies, at least make them buddy detectives, like every other filmmaker in the world seems capable of doing.

But I get it. It’s a low-budget film, a film noir made to appeal to the male gaze. Of course, it’s going to pander. But still, it doesn’t deliver. And rarely is that so blatant as in Bad Detectives.

Apart from the characters, I don’t even know what’s going on. I really don’t.

You have a random guy walking into their office, beating the snot out of both women, leaving, and that’s that. They act like this is an everyday thing.

You have police who claim their grandfathers died of natural causes—despite knowing they were murdered. You have villains introduced in the last 15 minutes of runtime, with no background, but we’re supposed to care about them? You have old detective guys who are supposedly on the girls’ side… but why? No explanation. You have friendly guys who suddenly turn evil. Why? Who knows.

There are so many plot holes, so many threads that go nowhere. It’s just a whole lot of nothing.

And when I say, “I don’t know why things happen”, it’s not because I wasn’t paying attention. I was. But the sound mixing in this film is beyond horrible. Some of the worst I’ve ever encountered.

The big problem? Too much music. Way too much. There’s never silence. And for reasons unknown, the director decided the music was more important than the dialogue. The music is louder than the actors. I could not hear them. I had to turn on closed captions just to figure out what was going on. But even then, the music was so distracting that it was hard to focus. And it’s not even bad music! But are we making a music video or a movie? Because I’m here for the story.

I wanted a neon-drenched neo-noir film with misbehaving girls doing everything wrong. Instead, I got a story that goes nowhere, a strong lesbian subtext that also goes nowhere, and two leads I barely know anything about. There’s no character development. By the end of the movie, I know just as little about them as I did at the beginning.

So, who the hell made this film? Why is it so bad?

Bad Detectives was directed by Presley Paris, who has mostly done shorts. Their only other movie is The Contrast, another film with awful reviews. I haven’t seen it, but every complaint about The Contrast applies here too. Chris Johnson wrote this movie. He also wrote The Contrast. Enough said.

I actually feel bad for the actors because I don’t think they were terrible. They just weren’t given anything to work with. Freya Tingley, who plays one of the granddaughters, does the voices of Mene and Fymryn in Dota: Dragon’s Blood—a fantastic show. She also played Christina Wendell in Hemlock Grove and did an excellent job there, too.

As for Dralla Aierken? She has charisma and presence. I do want to see more from her. She’s a young Uyghur Chinese actress with plenty of experience—she starred in Only Children and even wrote, directed, and acted in a 23-minute short called Cindra. I saw Cindra—it was pretty good!

There were a lot of other bit players in this film, and I do appreciate the Asian cast and the Chinatown setting—that’s a great backdrop for a noir film.

But as I said, the movie does not live up to its premise. It understands aesthetics but can’t deliver. It knows how to pitch a plot, but whoever made the poster was clearly more creative than whoever made the film.

And for that reason, I cannot recommend Bad Detectives.

https://youtu.be/EYHbaBtrqMo

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