Out of Ideas
As the daughter of local cop legend, Mike Cutler (Francis X. McCarthy), Marcie (Laura Vandervoort - Damage), who works in CSI, wants to follow in his footsteps and become a detective. When a snitch is found murdered, drugs go missing from the lock up and an officer starts having a drinking problem Lieutenant Sinclair (Leni Parker - Living with the Enemy) asks Marcie to quietly snoop around as she suspects there is a dirty cop in her precinct. The trouble is that Marcie gets charmed by detective Gus Sutton (Chris Kramer - Her Fatal Flaw), who not only is manipulative but is in fact that dirty cop who is busy setting up his partner to take the fall.
This movie review could be short and sweet by saying that "Out of Control" is a stereotypical made for TV cop movie where we have an attractive woman solving a case involving a corrupt officer. And that is no spoiler by telling you "Out of Control" involves a corrupt officer because we learn this within 10 minutes of the movie starting and for the other 80 minutes we watch as first this female officer, a CSI officer at that, is tricked in to thinking one thing before suddenly realising the truth. If I am sounding a bit disparaging I am because sadly unlike other made for TV movies "Out of Control" fails to generate much excitement or tension and the ending is simply corny.
Movies like "Out of Control" actually annoy me because within the first 20 minutes it tells you everything and it then becomes a procession through some obvious developments and daft scenes till eventually the bad guy gets caught. This wouldn't be so bad if during that procession there was something of interest but it is all too obvious as Marcie and Gus end up in bed whilst Gus manipulates Marcie to think that his partner Lisa is the dirty cop. It makes "Out of Control" for the most forgettable, which in truth is probably not such a bad thing.
But there are a couple of things about "Out of Control" which are harder to erase from your memory and there is the fact that Laura Vandervoort as Marcie is attractive but then you end up laughing at all the laws she breaks whilst doing her job. That is not the worst of it as the ending which see Marcie go all karate kid is simply hilarious and I thought for a minute the movie had morphed into "Charlie's Angels". Aside from Vandervoort the rest of the acting is ordinary and the characters are forgettable, well they are generic TV movie characters.
What this all boils down to is that whilst I usually can stand a made for TV cop movie "Out of Control" simply failed and ended up an experience I wish I could forget. I know you don't expect great entertainment from TV movies but this is below par and sadly the sort of movie which has led others to mock the TV movie genre.
