Dark Beauty

Salacious enough to ensure that boredom never entirely sets in, Dark Beauty is a typically predictable and entirely silly made-for-TV thriller that admittedly does boast a better-than-expected performance from star Alicia Coppola. The actress stars as Melanie Dempsey, a photojournalist whose friendship with Randall Batinkoff’s Danny is threatened after he begins dating a mysterious figure named Olivia (Elizabeth Berkley). For reasons never made entirely clear, Melanie becomes suspicious of Olivia almost immediately and subsequently launches into a full-scale (yet relatively surreptitious) investigation into the woman’s life. Melanie’s dogged efforts at exposing Olivia’s dark side ultimately results in an increasingly repetitive structure, with the majority of Dark Beauty‘s running time devoted to a relentless series of sequences in which Melanie pokes around offices and questions Olivia’s former associates. The degree to which screenwriter Riley Weston goes out of her way to paint Danny as a blundering idiot probably doesn’t help matters, as the character absurdly accuses Melanie of jealousy even after being presented with some pretty conclusive evidence that Olivia’s up to no good. Berkley’s smarmy work, coupled with an ingratiating turn from Coppola, effectively ensures that Dark Beauty is far from the bottom of the barrel as far as movies of this ilk go, yet it’s impossible to shake the feeling that there’s just got to be a better way to spend two hours of one’s life.

** out of ****