The Gourmet Detective: A Healthy Place to Die (2015) Dylan Neal, Brooke Burns, Matthew Kevin Anderson, Marc Senior, Ali Skovbye Movie Review

The Gourmet Detective: A Healthy Place to Die (2015)   3/53/53/53/53/5


Brooke Burns and Dylan Neal in The Gourmet Detective: A Healthy Place to Die (2015)

Crime Solving at a Cooking Conference

When police detective Maggie Price (Brooke Burns - Undercover Bridesmaid) is ordered by her boss to take the leave owing to her the charming chef Henry (Dylan Neal - A Wife's Nightmare) just happens to be at the station as he is delivering a birthday cake to Maggie's boss, one of his Facebook friends. With Henry off to a local resort where he is a guest speaker at a major gathering of top chefs he invites Maggie to join him as his assistant had to back out and so her room will go to waste. But when a journalist covering the event goes missing and is then found murdered Maggie and Henry once again join forces to solve the crime which is quite a mystery and ends up involving a movie star and other high profile guests.

I think 2015 may have been the year of the TV detective movies as every few months it felt like Hallmark Movies & Mysteries had yet another new movie featuring amateur crime detectives finding themselves involved in yet another mystery to solve. The thing is that these TV detective movies are never really about the solving of the crime and that isn't just a modern trend as even back in the days of the "Hart to Hart" movies it was all about the characters and their chemistry rather than solving a crime. As such whilst in "The Gourmet Detective: A Healthy Place to Die" we have a mystery involving a missing journalist who turns up dead who prior to his death was seen having a public argument and then there are of course various suspects all with motives, but the solving of the crime is not really that gripping.

What instead is more gripping or should I say more of a draw when it comes to "The Gourmet Detective: A Healthy Place to Die" are the characters with Dylan Neal delivering plenty of charm as Henry whilst Brooke Burns is attractive and determined as Maggie. And as in the previous movie it is the chemistry they have, the love but pretend to hate thing going on which of course is what makes you smile. The trouble is that you can find the same thing in so many of these made for TV detective movies that with there being so many they start to become a little bit of a blur, all but an entertaining one at that.

What this all boils down to is that "The Gourmet Detective: A Healthy Place to Die" is two things; it is firstly a typical made for TV amateur/detective movie and secondly it is entertaining in a typical manner, which means unless you are a fan of TV movies which rely on characters and their playful chemistry this won't be enjoyable.

Tags: TV Mystery Movie Crime Solvers


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