By Jay Betsill
Alyssa Milano stars as Grace Miller, a prominent mystery novelist and crime expert, in the new Netflix thriller Brazen, which premiered on the streaming service on January 13th and debuted at No.2 on the Top 10 most watched list.
Based on the novel “Brazen Virtue” by prolific romance writer Nora Roberts, Brazen plays out like a combination of a Hallmark Movie of the Week and a procedural crime drama. Milano’s Grace is a popular author on a book tour who receives a call from her sister Kathleen that she needs some help in her custody case, prompting Grace to drop what she’s doing and go help out her sister.
Upon arrival to Washington D.C. where her sister lives in their childhood home, Grace and Kathleen are quickly arguing about things involving Kathleen’s powerful ex-husband and her past addiction to pills. While discussing her job as a teacher at a nearby private school, Kathleen neglects to mention that she’s earning money on the side as a dominatrix on a webcam fantasy site.
Grace attracts the attention of Kathleen’s next door neighbor, police detective Ed Jennings (Sam Page), and after returning from their first date, Grace discovers Kathleen has been murdered.
This is where the movie shifts into “Who-Dun-It” mode and with the police captain allowing Grace to join Jennings and his partner Ben (Malachi Weir) in the investigation (like it’s straight out of an episode of Murder, She Wrote) that has a myriad of suspects from her ex-husband that Kathleen had dirt on to several students at the high school and even the family that owns the web cam company.
When another dominatrix from the website is murdered, the case switches from a potential personal attack on Kathleen to a likely serial killer investigation.
In addition to the many unbelievable situations that pile up throughout the story (none the least of which is the police captain allowing Grace to be involved in the investigations despite OBVIOUS conflicts of interest), the movie that could have been pulpy fun ends up being rather predictable. We’re not giving anything away, but odds are pretty good that you’ll have figured things out before the experts in the movie.
At least it’s not boring.
Thanks to a good performance by Milano and the chemistry between Page and Weir as the police detectives, Brazen is worth a view on a cold winter’s afternoon.
Brazen is currently streaming on Netflix.
BRAZEN (Unrated)
Scale of 1-10 – 5
