Film Review: Derailed (2005) C-

Date Viewed: 5/23/06
Venue: DVD

Derailed tries really hard to be an old-fashioned revenge thriller. There’s plot twists aplenty. An affair. A femme fatale. Blackmail. Murder. A police detective with a vendetta. A man on the verge of losing everything. Sounds great, right? All the right elements are present and accounted for. But unfortunately Derailed fails to deliver.

Harmed mostly from one-note characterizations and flimsy logic, the film trudges on, hoping the audience doesn’t see the the obvious plot twists coming a mile away or question the whys and hows too much.

Jennifer Aniston must be commended taking a role we’re unaccustomed to seeing fom her, that of a femme fatale. But she, like the rest of the cast, suffers from a script that offers very little characterization. The performances here aren’t bad, they’re just kind of there. Each and every character can be completely described in one word.

All that said, Derailed is well paced, starting slowly and cautiously building tension throughout. The final act is particularly well constructed (that’s where there’s actually one well-executed twist…although it’s immediately followed by one not-so-well-executed twist, go figure), which cements the fact that Derailed’s problems lie in the story, not in the telling