Be-Bored
With her divorce still to be finalised, six months pregnant Julie (Amanda Schull - Imaginary Friend) and her boyfriend, Trent (Charlie Hofheimer - The March Sisters at Christmas), head to an out of season resort of Cape Cod for a get away. But their quiet romantic get away turns into a nightmare when Trent is kidnapped and Julie starts getting threatening messages demanding ransom. With no one she can call on for help Julie is forced to call Jonathan (Hal Ozsan), her soon to be ex-husband, and ask him to help save her secret boyfriend. But things are not as they seem and Julie finds herself having to fight for her life and that of her yet to be born baby.
What I didn't mention in that synopsis of "Betrayed" is a creepy guy who has been watching Julie and Jonathan from afar, taking photos of them who then goes to a hotel room to show the pictures to a man waiting there. Unfortunately whilst we get served up this ominous set up which culminates with Julie waking up to find Trent having gone it is all incredibly slow going with a lot of scenes which appear to have little importance. Julie and Trent have a falling out because she wants to keep him a secret, they also row because Trent is thinking of buying a restaurant in the area and hasn't mentioned it to her.
Now eventually things in "Betrayed" kick off when Julie gets the first threatening phone call demanding money and she finds a blood soaked phone in the room. Unfortunately they kick off with a montage scene to music of Julie trying to transfer the money to the account the voice on the phone gave her except the music is a pop song which fails abysmally to create the right atmosphere. To make matters worse we then get the landlady showing up and what drama there was slows down to a trudge as all of a sudden Julie has pregnancy pain.
In truth by now I had given up all hope of "Betrayed" coming good as whilst it serves up this tangled web with Julie in the middle of it the atmosphere is never there to make it a tense thriller. It makes it extremely hard to get into especially when director John Stimpson often seems to be distracted by Amanda Schull's pretty features rather than getting on with the story. I reckon if you were to cut out all of the painful, irrelevant build up and the scenes of Julie looking pretty whilst looking in to the distance "Betrayed" would barely last 45 minutes.
What this all boils down to is "Betrayed" just didn't work for me as not only did it fail to create the right atmosphere, due in part to bad music choices, it also suffered from being seriously padded out with irrelevant scenes.
