Three Blind Mice (Mystery Telefilm)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Telefilm: C

 

 

In what plays like an attempt to launch another TV detective franchise, Brian Dennehy is Ed McBain’s Matthew Hope in Three Blind Mice, a disappointing would- be mystery about three Vietnam teens who have been brutally murdered.  The twist is that Hope knows a politician who threatened to kill them in Vietnamese on news TV and automatically becomes the #1 suspect.

 

Of course, he is arrested and Hope does not want to get involved, but the men had brutally beaten and even tried raping his wife, so hope will reluctantly look into it.  And that is the problem.  We have seen this all before and we know there would not be a “mystery” (i.e., the “real” story to be uncovered) if it were not a mystery film.  The result is something even more gutted-out than Murder, She Wrote and as tired as Matlock.  That’s too bad, because Brian Dennehy could easily carry such a show.

 

One issue is how the show uses race, then drags in Vietnam, almost to a degree to distance us from and trivialize both for the sake of a mystery that never works.  Even with Rosalind Chao, Jason Beghe and Mary Stuart Masterson in the cast, this never comes together, and is loaded with distractions that prove just how weak this mystery is.  The 90 minutes are stretched out pretty thin as a result and director Christopher Leitch does not know how to compensate for the many flaws.

 

The full frame image is above average at best, with color consistency, but indecision about what kind of camera style to use.  Sometimes, the shots are stable, others are shaky, and this often happens in the same scene!  Not good.  However, we’ve seen worse.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo has minor Pro Logic surrounds, but both it and its use of music vaporize quickly from memory.  There are no extras, but that is no surprise, because the film itself does little.  Three Blind Mice involves a deck of cards, but never plays with a full deck.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo