Note: The writer of this review watched Above Suspicion on a digital screener from home. Before making the decision to see it—or any other film—in a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Here’s an interview on the matter with scientific experts.
Above Suspicion spends a lot of time concentrating on Emilia Clarke’s beautiful, cherubic face—only to beat it to a pulp on several occasions. The Game Of Thrones star plays Susan Smith, a woman addicted to drugs in a small Kentucky town circa 1988. Her double-wide is overpopulated: She shares it not just with her two kids but also her violent ex (Johnny Knoxville, of course), who sends her out to commit fraud by cashing social security checks, plus his bank-robbing pal and the pal’s girlfriend. Smith sees salvation on the horizon when newly relocated FBI agent Mark Putnam (Jack Huston) enters her life. After her little brother gets pinched for shooting a drug dealer during a fight, she becomes Putnam’s informant, meeting up at faraway spots to exchange info. It’s when she finally gives up the bank robber she’s harboring that a torrid affair begins between her and the G-man. That’s when all hell breaks loose.
Shot way back in 2016, but only now reaching American theaters and digital services, Above Suspicion plays exactly like a movie you’d expect to sit on the shelf for years, no one pushing hard for its release. The film appears to be a labor of love for producer Colleen Camp, the veteran Clue and Police Academy actor who optioned its source material—a 1993 nonfiction book by Joe Sharkey—two decades ago. Shockingly, it’s directed by Phillip Noyce, who once upon a time helmed big-budget studio thrillers starring Harrison Ford and Angelina Jolie. Noyce and the cast (which includes reliable folk like Thora Birch, Chris Mulkey, and Veep’s Kevin Dunn) are mostly stuck with a lazy-ass script by Chris Gerolmo (Mississippi Burning) that presents the real-life players (especially the Kentucky residents) as one-note ignorant sociopaths making dumb decisions at the worst possible times.
Above Suspicion, maybe the 30th movie to use that title, is a major step down for everyone involved: the cast, the director, even cinematographer Eliot Davis, who had a nice run in the ’90s DPing Steven Soderbergh projects. (He does what he can here, capturing most of the action in bleak, depressing blues.) The movie is told from Smith’s perspective—Clarke narrates in a down-home voice-over—and we’re clearly meant to sympathize with her, even when she goes into Fatal Attraction mode and infiltrates her lover’s home, getting chummy with his wife (Sophie Lowe). She’s a hard character to root for, regardless if you know how this true-crime story ends. As if nervous our sympathy might indeed wane, the film piles on needlessly, gratuitously brutal scenes in the second half of Smith getting the holy hell beaten out of her.
Who told British actresses they could only prove themselves in the States by playing miserable women with rural accents, trapped in squalid hellhole lives? It’s disheartening to see Clarke as a coked-up lost soul, basically stuck in her own trailer park nightmare. (The choppy party scenes, in particular, are just so bush league.) Often teetering between seductive and sinister, she brings some longing to the role, playing someone so desperate to get away from her putrid surroundings that she’s willing to snitch on her own and break up a man’s happy home. For all the star’s efforts, though, Above Suspicion will mostly just appeal to the crowd that found Hillbilly Elegy compelling. Everyone else will be left wishing they could see Khaleesi fly high and free again.
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Emilia Clarke and…Johnny Knoxville? Shot way back in 2016, but only now reaching American theaters and digital services, Above Suspicion plays exactly like a movie you’d expect to sit on the shelf for years, no one pushing hard for its release.and this was shot before GoT went off the rails/air? jesus.
The fifth season of Game of Thrones aired in 2015.
? as a non-viewer I got the impression from friends/headlines that opinion didn’t really turn around until seasons 7 and especially 8.
The first three books were adapted into the first four seasons. They only VERY loosely adapted the next two books (which would have been difficult to faithfully adapt for the show), and in doing so had some of the worst received bits in the show’s history (up to that point) like the Sand Snakes, and Sansa going to Winterfell (the latter bit included a subplot for Brienne that wound up being completely pointless). This is really when the writers started flying by the seats of their pants.
Martin fans will never admit this, but his 4th and 5th books kind of sucked too and took ten years. They act like HBO screwed up the whole thing but in actuality only the first three books were really great, which reflected when the TV show was great. With Dorne, other Targarians and a bunch of nonsense being introduced in book 4, in retrospect the signs were already there that this was going downhill.
Those books are taking up the space that was originally supposed to be a five-year gap between acts. GRRM still hasn’t gotten to the second act he described in his pitch letter.
I was going to say the same thing. GRRM intended for there to be a big time-jump for the younger kids to age up into their new roles, but he realized that all the Westerosi politics were too unstable for that and there was nowhere to “park” Jon or Cersei or Tyrion for half a decade that wouldn’t require a mountain of unpacking. So, he decided to write his way through it, which ended up involving creating a bunch of “Coy and Vance” characters who have no purpose in the overall narrative and are there just to have someone do something while he burned some time.
I’m unfamiliar with “Coy and Vance”.
Ahh, that’s because I’m old. It’s a “Dukes of Hazzard” reference where notoriously (at the time) the actors who played Bo and Luke Duke held out for more money, at which point they were replaced with lookalike “cousins” Coy and Vance. It was a disaster, Coy and Vance disappeared shortly thereafter never to be spoken of again. So, shorthand for meaningless short-term replacement character.
Everything I heard about those books was mixed to negative until those seasons came out, and all of a sudden the show was ruining the source material.
Books 4 and 5 had a huge shift in protagonists. It’s interesting things being done by new people you don’t care about, and people you do care about not doing much at all.However, if you leave aside traditional expectations for fantasy with hero protagonists and take those books on their own terms, as the huge expansion of the world and exploration of the consequences of war, I think they’re pretty great. I totally see how some people can have those as their favourites. But those are usually the type of people who read these books more than once and I can’t expect everyone to do that.
I don’t know if this is when it started, but season 5 is when I first noticed the pattern of setting up every plotline in episode 1, make incremental progress or spin wheels for episodes 2-8, everything happens in episode 9 and 10 is the epilogue. Then I started seeing it in other shows and I couldn’t watch prestige dramas anymore.
Game of Thrones was well known for having its biggest moments in episode 9 of each season. Arguably that applies less to season 5 than the preceding ones.
Otherwise known as soap opera plotting, where the only days anything important happens is Mondays and Fridays, the rest of the time people just repeat conversations to each other.
5 was when the Dorne parts started showing the writer’s hands.6 was when the writing really took a dive, but for some reason people were like “Battle of the Bastards! Greatest Episode Ever!!!!!!” (It wasn’t).
Yeah, from 5 on there was a steady decline in quality. Though I still think Martin has no right to complain about them. In the voice of J. Walter Weatherman, “and that’s why you don’t push an adaptation of a book series you never intend to finish.”
I really hope Emilia Clarke has her GoT residuals well invested, because the stuff she’s been in since then has been mediocre to awful, and her acting, the way she emotes with her eyebrows, is community theater level performing.
I wonder if she and Emma Watson ever see each other’s eyebrow acting and think “My god, she’s incredible.”
Maybe The Rock was their favorite wrestler growing up? Who knows.
Oh Emma knows Emilia totally has her beat. Because Clarke at least has some semblance of personality and presence on screen, whereas Watson has, to paraphrase MST3K, authentic screen absence.
I wonder if they read the popular acting guide “All I Learned About Acting I Learned From John Belushi’s Eyebrows”.
I somewhat agree with the criticism of her acting but she’s had a bunch of movie roles around GoT and got cast in one of the upcoming MCU shows recently. I don’t think she has to worry much about finding parts or making money.
I actually thought she was one of the best parts of Solo, and I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment either. She was really light and funny.
Hey, what about Last Christmas!
I saw the trailer for this, and TAY-AY IN DA WEEEEE-IND was a more subtle use of a Southern accent.
I always rather admired Colleen Camp, but this sounds bizarre. Susan Smith, really?
Not the Susan Smith who drowned her kids. This is the Susan Smith who wound up in a torrid affair with an FBI agent who*spoiler alert for a decades old crime that’s been done to death on Investigation Discovery*strangled her to death when she fell pregnant and claimed he was the father.
This has to be the most unlikely article for Yvette from Clue to show up on, right?
“But YESS!”
Who told British actresses they could only prove themselves in the States by playing miserable women with rural accents, trapped in squalid hellhole lives?And yet for all that time spent with the dialogue coach, they’re still gonna say “ennehthing”.Anyway, my hot take is that Emilia Clarke has always been a mediocre actress, but she’ll be able to coast on the whole “English rose” thing and keep getting roles that Keira Knightley said no to. Speaking of English roses who still haven’t found the right film to expand their star power, I hold out hope for Kaya Scodelario.
Kaya Scodelario is my Spirit Animal.
I feel for Kaya what you feel for Emilia, but I think they’re both gonna be stuck in that “Keira and Florence didn’t return our calls” English rose next tier down.
They’re probably trending toward third tier, tbh. Daisy Ridley’s got second tier on lock; RIP to Felicity Jones; Gemma Arterton, I will keep you in my thoughts.
Florence Pugh is by some distance the best of the lot, I reckon (her range is a handful of roles is already incredible) and I think Kaya Scodelario has unfortunately the biggest gap between talent and fame – she’s tremendous, much better than some of those others mentioned who are household names.Gemma Arterton I’ve never rated at all. I didn’t watch The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society for ages, despite it being both on the BBC iPlayer and Netflix, because I’d somehow got it in my head that Arterton starred in it, instead of the much better Lily James (hey, there’s another one!)I think that’s eight we’ve mentioned so far (albeit Keira Knightley is probably going for slightly older roles than most of the rest). They must all hate the sight of each other, now. Actually scratch that, they must all hate the sight of Florence Pugh.
Lily James is much better? I feel like every time I see her in a movie she looks like an actor acting as opposed to an actual character. She had a monologue in “Little Woods” that I still remember as being particularly terrible. I generally like Knightly even though I think she basically plays the same character in every movie, just set in a different time period. Pugh has been great in everything I’ve seen her in even though I haven’t particularly enjoyed her movies (Little Women, Fighting with my Family, Midsommar) and now that she’s landed a Marvel role I’m sure she’ll have no trouble finding work in the future.
Better than Gemma Arterton, I absolutely think so.Lady Macbeth is a tremendous early showcase for Florence Pugh, if you’re interested. Mark Kermode famously predicted her for stardom once he saw it, as did a lot of other people.
I’ll admit that I only remember seeing Arterton in one of the Bond movies, so I’m not going to be a good judge of talent. It’s just hard for me to believe that James is markedly better than anyone.
It’s going to be a long time before I can take Pugh seriously after seeing her trying to play a… what, twelve-year-old? in Little Women.
I don’t put Florence Pugh in the same English rose category as the others because she has a bonus weapon in her arsenal, aside from her formidable acting talent: blondeness.
Side note: I hate that I started this whole conversation, because I’m now thinking about how Florence Pugh is probably competing for roles with the likes of Saoirse Ronan and Elizabeth Debicki (and Mia Wasikowska if you’re ballin’ on a budget) and I have determined that I just have too much space in my brain for actresses of all ages; meanwhile I was fully on this website, like, yesterday talking about how I forgot Andrew Garfield existed.
(Also, Hayley Atwell’s got two Mission: Impossible movies coming up, which is nice, because at 39 I’m sure I’ll see her playing someone’s grandmother soon)
I dug Kaya in Crawl.
Crawl was pretty fun; a solid $10 million creature feature that was gorier than expected at times and must have been absolutely miserable to film.
Not sure Kiera Knightley has the option of turning down too many roles nowadays.
Clarke’s southern Appalachian accent is accurate. It isn’t supposed to sound like Gone With the Wind.
I know the title says this movie “is beneath everyone involved– especially Emilia Clarke” but poor Jack Huston. I know he’s been in one bomb, the Ben-Hur remake, but he’s been in some damn good TV and also some movies. He’s likely built up a better resume, success to bomb-ratio, than Clarke and definitely Knoxville.
Man, talk about not even being able to clear the low bar.
“I’m Johnny Knoxville, and this is The Wifebeater!”
“I’m Johnny Knoxville, and Welcome to Jackass!”“What this is something I’m involved with that isn’t Jackass?”
“This is going to suck isn’t it?”
You shut your mouth, Walking Tall is a basic cable classic for a reason!
I mean, you have a film that has a member of Jackass smacking people around, and you don’t even incorporate this?
So you could say this movie is…Below Notice.Or something.Clarke needs a new agent.
Who told British actresses they could only prove themselves in the States by playing miserable women with rural accents, trapped in squalid hellhole lives?Sorry, that was me. I thought I was replying to Kate Winslet but I must have hit reply all instead. Won’t happen again.
Winslet knows well enough that she can play miserable woman of any accent trapped in any hellhole lives, be they squalid or merely riddled with ennui. Not everyone has that kind of hellhole range.
Careful. She’s going to smack you around with a hoagie wrapped in an Eagles t-shirt.
I’d say it wouldn’t be the first time but I don’t think I’ve caught an Eagles shirt yet. Stryper, Foghat, and what I think was a Fleetwood Mac but might have just been Stevie Nicks but never an Eagles.
The title of this sounds like something that would have been made in 1998 with Wesley Snipes and Ashley Judd.
Are we sure this movie is a step down for Chris Mulkey? Keep in mind that I’ve seen Twin Peaks several times.
He’s been around forever. I first saw him in The Hidden.
When I saw who the director was, I gasped. Dead Calm still holds up (except for the ending which never really did). I miss when Nicole Kidman had curly red hair. Ginger girls are so pretty. (Thanks to Kerri Green for making me realize that at a young age.)
Hot take: Emilia Clarke is pretty boring and makes crappy movies.
Slightly kinder hot take: Emilia Clarke is pretty, boring and makes crappy movies.
(Also, I really like most of Solo and she is fine in it. Her willingness to deliver that god awful and totally unnecessary exposition at the beginning gets her an extra point from me too.)
I think Emilia Clarke was just miscast in Solo. She just came across as way too wholesome and nice for the role. For that character (street urchin turned trafficked prostitute turned assassin) they really needed a young Angelina Jolie type who could pull off “wild child” in the early going and “ice cold, deeply damaged femme fatale with a (maybe) heart of gold” in the back half.
Love it, even though you forgot your Oxford comma.
I can’t bring myself to use them 🙂
Emilia Clarke, girl, it’s not your fault GoT threw you under the bus in the finale. That doesn’t make you a bad actress. Stop accepting shifty roles and wait for what you deserve.
Is it part of the plot that Clarke’s character’s ex is 15 years older than her? Knoxville seems a bit miscast if it isn’t.
Well, It’s Kentucky in ‘88, so . . .
Can someone give the lovely Emilia Clarke a good project please? She deserves better.
“…especially Emilia Clarke”Is it though? Hot take comin’ through!She was the least skilled performer of Game of Thrones. She won the lottery the first time around and since then has been coasting on that so I’d say this material is not beneath her, but just about at her level.
This isn’t the same Susan Smith who drowned her children in South Carolina in 1994, and blamed a nonexistent black man, is it?