Unnaturally Boring
Matt (Angus Macfadyen) and Julia McKay (Tara Reid) run a successful advertising agency in Barcelona, Spain and things are going well. The trouble is that Matt is a suspicious person and he is convinced that Julia is cheating on him so asks business colleague Trevor Jones (Colm Meaney) to keep an eye on her and have someone follow her. Trevor a driven man who is desperate to become a partner in the agency gets pictures of a meeting between Julia with another man. It pushes Matt over the edge as he starts to behave irrationally and wants his cheating wife dead except when he receives news that Julia has been killed he feels guilty and takes his own life. But things are not what they seemed as Julia isn't dead, Matt may not have taken his own life and Julia is going to have to watch her back.
I rate Colm Meaney as a good actor having watched him in numerous movies over the years but if I stumbled across him purely having watched "Unnatural Causes" or "Clean Break" as it is also known I would not give him another thought. In fact if I had never seen Angus Macfadyen do better I would have been less than impressed with his acting ability from this either. Although Tara Reid well she delivers the same sort of one dimensional performance that she has delivered in pretty much all of her movies including the "American Pie" movies. What I am basically saying is that the acting in "Unnatural Causes" is of a generally poor level although the characters are so poorly written with such poor dialogue that they don't do any of the actors any favours. This makes it an incredibly difficult movie to get into when you find the characters annoying and the acting laughable.
The knock on effect of this is that you give up caring about the ins and outs of the story and there are a few as we have some twists and turns, corrupt people and things apparently not as they seem with Julia's life in danger. Except it is impossible to care whether or not Julia is in danger or Matt killed himself because the characters are so uninteresting in the first place. The knock on effect of this is that the only thing which grabs your attention is the various outfits which Tara Reid squeezes into which show off her cleavage. Even the action scenes such as one where Matt in a fiery hot temper dangerously drives through a busy street fails to get you excited.
What this all boils down to is that "Unnatural Causes" might once have had a good storyline but by the time this movie wrapped the storyline was lost behind uninteresting characters, bad acting, less than thrilling action and a complete lack of atmosphere. The only thing I can say which even comes close to a positive is that at least the camera work isn't blurry even if it is all as dull and safe as vanilla.
