OK, I'm calling for the revocation of director Martin Campbell's filmmaking privileges. Just because he had some goodies like Casino Royale (with cheese!) and The Mask of Zorro in the past which keep getting held up in trailers as false promises of coming goodness in trailers, the fact his recent movies including Memory, Dirty Angels, and Cleaner (which I see I opened with this same rant) have been various breeds of dogs - his last decent movie I saw was 2017's The Foreigner (7/10, never finished the review) - and Just Play Dead is another mark in the bad column.
I'd never even heard of this thing and normally wouldn't have given it a look if not for the presence of Eva Green (who starred in Dirty Angels as well as Casino Royale and needs to tell her agent to stop taking Campbell's calls), but even those two factors aren't enough to advise anyone to suffer through this half-assed convoluted mess of a movie where I suspect everyone did it for the check and the location.
Samuel L. Jackson co-stars as Jack Wolfe, a corrupt developer who's living the high life in the Canary Islands, funding his lifestyle by embezzling from the company. We meet him on his sailboat as he's poisoning a collaborator who is threatening to testify for the authorities. Even with this witness dead, he knows the law will ultimately catch up to him, so he hatches a scheme which he shares with his wife, Nora (Green).
He wants to fake his death, framing her current boy toy, Chad (Jason Fernández), who is even dumber than Pete Davidson's SNL namesake, for the murder, with the couple splitting the $30 million insurance payout. Also, lurking on the periphery is Dani (Eoin Macken), a cop Nora was banging a few weeks earlier and broke up with. He thinks Jack and Nora are up to something, but is too personally involved to keep from screwing the investigation up. Complicating matters is Nora seems to be trying to flip the script by actually having Chad kill Jack with the promise of riches and sweet Eva Green boobs as the enticement.
Having recently watched Body Heat, suffering through this whatever-the-Temu-version-of-Temu-would-be-wannabe-caper's convoluted plot is all the worse as endless yammering about plots and motivations make the 97-minute runtime feel much longer. The Wolfe's marriage is more a convenience - she owns 51% because spouses can't be forced to testify against each other - stemming from when she was an escort Jack offered to entertain clients until one got out of hand, leading to her shooting him in self-defense.
Jack talks about loving her, but they have zero chemistry and her catting around doesn't hint at much wifely loyalty. Green is also undercut by unflattering makeup and a dull wardrobe which made me wonder out loud whether she had another dress, they were so similar.
The only interesting and original detail was a older woman cop being referred to as "the Nun" who is revealed to also be an actual nun as well as a cop. Whut? And the supposedly whammy twist ending comes from out of nowhere and just seems like a bad joke. Speaking of which, what was the thinking behind running bloopers behind the end credits like it was The Cannonball Run, not a steamy erotic thriller it imagines it was.
Just Play Dead is best as advice to Martin Campbell's career.
Score: 2/10. Skip it.
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