Nine Dead is a middling thriller that doesn't know if it wants to be the next Saw or the next Oldboy. Everything from the tone to the characterizations to the story arc is wildly uneven and ever-changing. It's as if writer Patrick Wehe Mahoney and director Chris Shadley did not trust the audience to pay attention for ninety-eight minutes so they just arbitrarily kept changing the film. Nine people are abducted in the area between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. They wake up handcuffed to pipes in a small room. A man in a mask walks in, informing the nine strangers they have ten minutes to figure out why they're all locked up or one of them is killed. This will continue every ten minutes until either they solve the mystery or they're all dead.

This film actually had a lot of potential. I remember being enraptured by another recent one-room thriller called Exam because everything about the production was committed to the one answer. Even when that answer didn't work, I still respected the film for going there. The problem with Nine Dead is that it doesn't commit to one version of the story.

It's a one room thriller that decides it needs to randomly hop out for flashbacks that offer nothing but a visual backdrop to an exposition monologue. We'd get the same effect, only stronger and with a greater claustrophobic edge, if the camera stayed tight on the actor's face. Instead of "show, don't tell," Mahoney and Shadley play "show and tell."

The inconsistencies don't end there. The characters act in highly irrational ways. How does it benefit the five English-speaking captives who know each other not to explain even a basic relationship? I can understand protecting your life-destroying secrets. That's human nature. Refusing to say "I'm this and he's that and we worked there together" is not. You would think they would straighten up after the first person is shot at point blank range, but they still sporadically decide when cooperating is their chance to escape.

Then there's the actual story. There is one solution to the captives' dilemma. It's a horrible solution that only one person in the room could actually have known about. Everyone else was so indirectly involved in the story that the captives routinely come up with far more plausible explanations than the killer had in mind. When a bunch of people who refuse to even use their real names are more logical than a killer who coldly calculated a revenge plan for two years, you have a problem.

Even the most cynical and hardened film-goer would be wise to avoid this film. The curiosity factor--Melissa Joan Hart in a thriller--is not even worth at as her character is the most nonsensical element of all. What she eventually says is so unrealistic, acted with such horrible instincts, that it makes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang look like a typical morning commute. Nine Dead is ultimately a textbook exercise in wasted potential.

Rating: 2/10

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