Every now and then a film comes by where the preview looks at though the film could be a dark horse and be a real winner despite not having a great deal of top talent in it. You don't need to have Tom Hanks or Gary Oldman in a film in order for it to be good, but I do think that when you have a pretty bad script you are probably going to end up with actors like Kristin Davis and Dermot Mulroney (who?)
I gave Deadly Illusions a shot based solely upon this hope that I might have found a thriller without a predictable ending and perhaps a decent script. I received neither of these things and instead found a tired subject matter that has been done so many times in the past as well as horrible dialogue and a predictable storyline.
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So basically this is just another Fatal Attraction type clone but instead focuses on a nanny instead of a random hookup or intentional mistress situation. Successful author who is too busy with her kids to write a new novel for a publisher is offered a very lucrative deal to get started on another one and then goes through an agency to find a nanny, only to be disappointed by the people who turn up for the interview. The movie starts off on a bad foot with me because the agency that finds these potential nannies talks about how all of their potentials have great educations and are the best of the best for the job, yet every single one of them is terribly flawed to the point where it immediately suggests that this agency has done a terrible job at screening their applicants. Yet we are meant to believe that this agency selects only the very best!
At the witching hour the perfect applicant turns up on a bicycle and wows author Mary Morrison (Kristin Davis) and she immediately hires her.
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It is apparent, even if you haven't seen the trailer and know nothing about the film, exactly what is going to happen next. This nanny named Grace Taylor is faking being sane, and is going to cause big problems for the Morrison family. It is just a question of how it is that she is going to do it.
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I think they realized that this was a dud of a script so they had to make it sexy (a tactic which isn't used very often anymore but used to be the norm) and they create situations where Grace seduces both the husband and the wife in order to keep things interesting - i guess.
The hopes of this taking a turn and being interesting with some sort of twist where Mary actually is the crazy one and not Grace (which is something they hint at throughout the film) never happens and in the end this film is just nearly 2 hours of "yeah, you already know what is going to happen."
Should I watch it?
If you watched that trailer you already know the entire film and I think that anytime that a studio makes a trailer that shows that much of the actual plot in the trailer already knows they have a dud on their hands but well, it was already too late, the money was gone, and it is going straight to Netflix anyway. I wish I had spent those near 2 hours doing literally anything else and therefore I think you should give this one a hard pass. There is a reason why it has 1.8 / 10 on IMDB after all.
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