Some people just aren’t good at murdering people.
Consider Cameron Finney. In 2013’s The Perfect Boss, Cameron (Linden Ashby) is a vice president of a pharmaceutical firm and the lover of Jessica Slate (Jamie Luner), who has just been hired to fast-track the FDA approval of a new drug called Ezapine. When Jessica and Cameron learn that one of their own researchers, Dan Renfro (Gary Hudson), is suggesting that Ezapine might not be as safe as the company claims, they decide to take matters into their own hands and murder Dan. By this point, in the film, it’s been established that Jessica has a history of killing people. She smothered her abusive stepfather. She drowned her own mother. Jessica has committed multiple murders and she’s still gone on to have a successful business career. She obviously knows how to get away with killing someone. But, for some reason, Cameron is the one who kills Dan.
From the start, it’s pretty obvious that Cameron has no idea how to pull this sort of thing off. For one thing, he follows Dan around in a rental car. For another thing, he fails to notice that there’s a witness watching him while he attacks Dan. And, finally, Cameron makes the rookie mistake of logging into Dan’s work computer without checking to see if anyone has installed tracking software on it. All of this allows Dan’s teenage daughter, Renee (Ashley Leggat), to investigate her father’s murder.
I liked Renee. She hasn’t even graduated from high school and she’s already solving murders. That was always my fantasy in high school. I wanted to investigate and solve a crime and prove to the police and all of the adults that I was more responsible and clever than they gave me credit for. Unfortunately, there weren’t any juicy local crimes for me to solve, other than figuring out who broke into our house one night. I didn’t really work hard to solve that crime because that crime actually freaked me out. (I slept with a golf club for months afterwards.) Instead, I tried to figure out what happened to D.B. Cooper. Unfortunately, it was kind of hard to investigate that from a Texas high school.
So, Renee accomplishes something that I never did. She solves the crime! But really, it’s not a hard crime to solve because Cameron was such an incompetent murderer. That said, I liked the fact that it gave Renee a chance to win her mother’s respect. At the start of the movie, Renee was getting yelled at for parking her car in a tow-away zone and always dressing in black and, by the end of it, she was graduating high school and realizing that she didn’t always have to paint her nails black. I could relate to Renee.
That said, the true star here is Jamie Luner. Luner was a mainstay in Lifetime films like this and she gives one of her best performances as the cheerfully sociopathic Jessica. I was a bit disappointed that there was never a direct confrontation between Jessica and Renee but at least we got plenty of scenes of Jessica scheming and subtly threatening people not to cross her. Cameron may have been an imperfect murderer but Jessica was truly the perfect boss.
