It’s going to be a bit of a mini-October Positivity review tonight. I spent today helping my neighbors move then crying because my neighbors had moved, and then trying to talk my new neighbors into not getting rid of their new house’s hot tub. I’m tired, so I’m going to try to keep things relatively short tonight.
In 2023’s Before It Happened, Eli Jenkins (played by the film’s director, Andrew Jacob Brown) is such a hard-boiled cop and detective that, when he realizes that the Mayor of his town has been kidnapping children and holding them prisoner in his home, he literally forces his way into the house and puts that perverted public official in his place. Now, you would think that the Mayor of reasonably-sized town being arrested for kidnapping a child would be big news and Detective Jenkins would be on all of the Fox or Newsmax shows. Instead, Jenkins gets yelled at for not following procedure.
Uhhmm, guys — your mayor was abducting children and holding them prisoner in his home! His wife was helping him! Why does no one in this movie seem to think this is as strange as I do? I mean, seriously, I know that we’re no longer shocked when a public official is arrested but this still seems like a pretty big deal.
Anyway, Jenkins is given a new assignment. He needs to find his ex-partner, Bobby (Jason Haines), and bring him to meet with his brother, the chief of police (Brian Eberly) who happens to be dying. Jenkins tracks down Bobby but it turns out that Bobby, who was once a good and ambitious cop, is now totally irresponsible and in debt because he sold some valuable basketball cards to a comic book store. Jenkins has to get the cards back before he can even think of taking Bobby to see his brother. Since the original owner of the cards is holding Jenkins’s current partner (Christopher Shane Lowry) as a hostage, it is literally a matter of life-and-death. Bobby and Jenkins work together to try to make things right and, along the way, they confront their own demons. This leads to an increasingly complicated series of events. Meanwhile, almost everyone that Jenkins talks to tells him that the Biblical prophecies are coming true and that the world will soon end….
There were some good things about this film. I did smile a bit at just how complicated Eli’s relatively simple assignment became. He just couldn’t catch a break and no one was willing to help out until Eli did something for them first. That part of the film had a lot of potential. But, like so many faith-based film, Before It Happened suffers from amateurish acting and a script that often seems to be trying too hard to imitate the big budget blockbusters that inspired the film. Sometimes, you just have to be willing to admit that you don’t have the budget or the experience necessary to make a Hollywood-style crime drama. Before It Happened‘s story had potential but the execution failed to realize it.
Through the Shattered Lens