There’s nothing scarier than having an intruder somewhere in your home. At least, that’s what Hollywood continuously wants us to believe. There have been some fantastic home invasion movies (“The Strangers”) and some horrible ones (the “When A Stranger Calls” remake).
No matter what the movie is called, it always amounts to the same thing: a woman (sometimes alone, sometimes not) is stalked through her home (usually in a really nice, big house with more than one floor) by a crazy person (who may or may not have just escaped prison). As a movie that follows the home invasion formula to a T, “No Good Deed” is only mildly decent at best and horrendously mediocre at worst.
Taraji P. Henson plays Terri Granger, a stay-at-home mom who’s alone with her two kids for the night because her husband, Jeffrey (Henry Simmons) has “plans with his dad.” The couple is shown to have a pretty rocky relationship from the start of the movie because Jeffrey never spends “personal time” with Terri anymore. So, right from the start, you know that the husband is a lying, cheating scumbag. The movie later tries to play this off as some big twist, but it’s a twist anyone could see coming from a mile away. It doesn’t really matter much, though as we only see Jeffrey in two scenes in the movie: at the beginning to introduce him and very briefly at the end. It’s almost as if Simmons was paid by per line.
Idris Elba plays Colin Evans, our crazy prison escapee villain for the movie. It seems Colin was the prime suspect for the murder of several women a few years ago. The killing, though, isn’t what put him in prison. Instead, he was put away for a few years for beating a guy half to death in a bar fight. He’s denied a parole at the beginning of the movie, and then kills his two prison transport guards and escapes. Of course, there’s never any kind of manhunt for this guy in the rest of the movie at all. It’s a movie, though, so you’re not supposed to think about it very hard.
One of the first things Colin does in the movie is murder his ex-fiancée. Her body is never discovered before the end of the movie, even though the police must know that after he escaped he would make going to his fiancée’s house a priority. (You expected this movie to make sense?)
After a while, we finally get to the main bulk of the movie. Colin arrives at Terri’s house after a car accident and asks to use the phone. It’s a dark and stormy night because the movie producers couldn’t resist using that cliché either.
The rest of the movie has Terri doing absolutely every single thing wrong that you could possibly do in a situation like this. She lets a strange man into her house when she’s alone with her two children (one’s about 6 and is the most well behaved 6-year-old in existence and the other is a baby). She doesn’t make sure that the man actually called a tow truck. She lies (in the most obvious way possible) that her husband will be home any minute. When the chase finally starts, she goes up the stairs at every opportunity instead of leaving the house with her kids. I wouldn’t mind all these mistakes except we’re told that the woman used to be a lawyer that specialized in homicide against females.
Idiotic characters aside, the best part of this movie is Idris Elba’s performance. He is an intimidating presence every moment he is on screen. In fact, he’s almost a bit too intimidating. The man makes even the most casual conversations in the movies seem too intense. It made the movie feel like it was trying too hard to seem like every moment might be the one in which his character finally snaps. The problem becomes that the audience gets used to the intimidation and the parts that actually are tense are lost in the rest of it.
At best, this is a Lifetime movie that only made it to the big screen because of Idris Elba. Without him, this would just be another movie about a stupid woman who lets a stranger into her house and suffers the consequences. I wouldn’t really recommend this movie unless you want to see all the wrong things to do when you have an intruder in your house. If that’s the case, by all means, go watch it. Otherwise, you’re better off watching something else alone in your own home.
