Inspector Bellamy

Inspector Bellamy sells itself as a mystery and thriller, but it fails at both promises and instead prefers to lumber listlessly through an unimportant and unsurprising mystery that doesn’t capture imagination and their attempts at twists unravel slower than a season of Dragonball Z.  The mystery itself is actually an afterthought to the drama Bellamy faces at home when his hated younger brother joins him and his wife on their holiday.  I guess the biggest mystery of the movie is why would Bellamy invite his younger brother in the first place?  Sadly that mystery is never solved.

The biggest let down was the marketing of the film.  The cover depicts Bellamy walking purposefully down a street with a handgun held at his side.  This badass depiction set up a story of an aging detective that is about to take people down in the name of justice, but instead Bellamy spends the movie maneuvering his mass around screen in a wheezing mess.  The most action seen in this film is when Bellamy almost falls down into a large manhole, but he’s saved by his wife and awkwardness ensues.

One positive for Bellamy is the complex characters that inhabit this world.  They might not be interesting or do anything worthwhile, and one of them is an unfortunate looking homeless man, but they all have distinct goals and needs and we get to see different aspects of their personalities.  Unfortunately this isn’t enough to save Bellamy.  I didn’t actually feel for any of the characters and some of them outright annoyed me.  Chief among them is Bellamy.  This man makes absolutely no sense.  He destroys his holiday with his wife by inviting his brother, which boggles my mind because he’s always groping his wife wouldn’t he want to be alone with her?  This makes even less sense when you learn that he hates his brother and proceeds to argue with him for the duration of the movie, but lets him borrow the car whenever he wants to.  He doesn’t even say anything when he basically catches them having sex.  Of course his wife doesn’t admit to it, but when you come home to your brother walking out of your bedroom with no shirt, your wife looks disheveled, and the sheets are all messed up you don’t have to call Sherlock Holmes to figure out that they’ve been throwing their sex parts together.  So either he chooses not to see or he is a shit-ass detective.  I’m not sure either way.

The mystery which takes up less time in the movie is a dull affair.  Bellamy is contacted by a man, Gentil, who confesses to murdering somebody, and then learns that this is the ex-insurance investigator who is all over the news for faking his death.  He’s undergone surgery, but it’s the same guy.  You learn through slow reveals that Gentil was having an affair and wanted to fake his death to run off with his mistress while leaving his wife a nice sum of money.  He’s eventually acquitted after his lawyer sings through his opening statements (I imagine the lawyer sang through the whole trial because that would make this movie better) because I can only assume the judge has major brain damage. 

Want to know what happens with the gun in the poster?  It was taken out of a drawer, then put in a drawer, then taken out of a drawer, then put back in the drawer.  And then near the end of the film the drawer was empty!  The brother stole the gun and ran off in Bellamy’s car…only to drive off a cliff.  NO CLIMAX.

If you enjoy watching paint dry or growing grass you might enjoy this movie, but if you don’t it is an agonizing character study on bad writing.  Maybe I'm missing something.  I want to believe there is part of this movie that went over my head, but as of now I wasted two hours.