A Freight Fright
Things are going well for diving instructor Cameron (Jenny Wade - No Reservations) as her boyfriend, Shane (Jordi Vilasuso - La Linea), has just proposed. Things are not so great for Shane as his boss at the freight company, Kelly (Juliana Harkavy), has come across irregularities in their numbers and pointed the finger at him. When Kelly is murdered in a late night hit and run Shane becomes main suspect, especially when a local reporter, Monica (Taylor Cole - Appetite for Love), unearths that Shane and Kelly were once an item. With Shane not forthcoming with the truth as to what he was up to the night Kelly died it forces Cameron to start snooping to get to the truth.
It's got to the point now that made for TV thrillers have turned into easy to watch dramas because they all tend to use a handful of themes. In "Below the Surface", which was aired in the UK as "Fatal Fiance", we have the theme that a woman discovers her handsome boyfriend is not what he seems and has a lot of secrets leading to her to turn in to a bit of a Nancy Drew to work out what is going on and in doing so putting herself in danger. As such "Below the Surface" tries to be more about the mystery of what the boyfriend might be in to that he might kill for and I say might as the movie doesn't immediately say whether or not he is a bad guy or at least responsible for a murder. And in fairness it is reasonably effective at creating the mystery even though it has several flaws and gets side tracked by irrelevant subplots once in a while.
What is clear is that "Below the Surface" is a beautiful people movie where everyone is in someway or another good looking. But it is also a movie of beautiful places which seem to have been used whether or not they seem believable such as when a detective is standing on a perfect beach and ends up meeting the perfect looking Monica who doesn't have a hair out of place and looks like she could have just stepped out of a modelling shoot. It sadly weakens what I genuinely believe could have been a half decent thriller and sucks it down to the ranks of other made for TV movies which rely on looks over the storyline and character depth.
What this all boils down to is that "Below the Surface" is a could have been movie as whilst it ends up dominated by the looks of the cast and the stunning location shots it could have been a half decent thriller which traded on mystery as it does a good job of holding certain things back.