The success of Reservoir Dogs gave rise to a slew of '90s indie thrillers based around unscrupulous characters turning on one another in a single location as they attempt to unravel a mystery. Set entirely within a police precinct and centred on the questioning of a suspect, the post-Reservoir Dogs thriller director Felipe Mucci's Detained most resembles is Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, right down to the inclusion of a mythical underworld figure.
Played by Abbie Cornish, Rebecca doesn't seem like the usual suspect of a noir thriller. There's very little remarkable about her, which perhaps is an asset in allowing the viewer to get on her side. After a night of drinking in her regular bar, Rebecca wakes with a raging hangover to find herself handcuffed to a table in the interrogation room of a crumbling police station. She's accused of driving drunk and committing a hit and run, but she has no memory of such. The last thing she remembers is leaving the bar with Robert (John Patrick Amedori), a young man she picked up, and who now claims he witnessed her crime. Police detectives Moon (Moon Bloodgood) and Avery (Laz Alonso) assume the respective roles of good cop/bad cop as they try to get Abbie to confess.
Something's not quite right about this scenario though. When asked why the precinct is empty, Rebecca is told it's under renovation. She's put in a unisex holding cell with a raving junkie, Sully (Silas Weit Mitchell), and a "scared rich girl," Jess (Josefine Lindegaard). When she requests her lawyer she's assigned a nervous rookie, Isaac (Justin H. Min), rather than her usual representative, who she's told is away on vacation. But Rebecca really twigs that something is wrong when she's visited by her friend Sarah (Breeda Wool), who strategically places her fingers over the lettering on a candy bar to expose the letters "R-U-N."
Detained shows its hand early on, following a dramatic conclusion to its first act and subsequently morphs into a different sub-genre of the crime thriller. I don't want to give anything away by going into details, but it's a type of thriller that's always fun, especially with a good cast, but one which relies heavily on tight plotting. Detained is a lot of fun, thanks to a cast largely made up of recognisable character actors who each get their moment in the spotlight, or rather the interrogation light, here.
It's in the plotting department that things get a little messy. The narrative is designed to keep us on our toes as we try to figure out what's really at play here, along with who is being their true self and who is inhabiting a role. Some of the twists are effective in throwing us off the scent, but others don't hold up to scrutiny. The narrative rug is pulled out from under us so many times that by the final act it seems as though some of the characters have themselves forgotten the original goal of this whole scenario. A lot of lies are told over the course of Detained, but at the end of the movie some of them are left hanging, and as the credits roll a few awkward questions linger.
Those who come to Detained with enough rope to climb out of its plot holes will find it an enjoyable thriller in spite of its rough edges. Despite being stuck in a chair for the bulk of the movie, Cornish is a quietly magnetic presence and does a very good job of subtly evolving from the confused and hungover Rebecca we initially meet to...well, you'll see. As the "bad cop," Alonso is a force of nature, disarmingly charming one minute and terrifying the next; his enigmatic turn goes a long way to keeping us guessing the true nature of Detective Avery's motivations. It won't develop a Reservoir Dogs or Usual Suspects cult following (few movies do now), but as a rare post-Tarantino ensemble crime thriller that plays its scenario with a straight face, Detained is worth interrogating for 97 minutes.
Directed by: Felipe Mucci
Starring: Laz Alonso, Moon Bloodgood, John Patrick Amedori, Justin H. Min, Breeda Wool
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