On Sunday, May 15, after "I Didn't Kill My Sister" — a good movie with a dumb title — Lifetime ran "Trust No One," also an Odyssey Media production and also a film that began with a different name ("Corrupt"), but a far inferior production, a dull story about the attempts of Pittsburgh district attorney Frank Murphy (hot African-American actor Andrew Moodie) to get the goods on a Mafia-connected money launderer named Vargano (Douglas Kidd). It's not actually specified by screenwriters Curtis James Crawford (who also directed) and Cathy and Wendy McKernan that he's part of the Mafia, but he has an Italian-sounding name, he's played by a swarthy actor who looks like Leonardo Di Caprio's big brother, and he's escaped prosecution by means of a large, muscular, mostly bald sandy-haired hit man, Taylor (Layton Morrison), who manages through almost supernatural powers to identify and knock off any potential witness against Vargano before the D.A. can actually get that person to court to testify against him. The leading character of the movie is actually Kate MacIntyre (Nicole de Boer), a forensic accountant who when she isn't teaching at a local college (there's a scene of her giving a lecture to her students in which she explains mark-to-market accounting) works under the D.A. trying to get the goods on Vargano by looking through all his accounting records to see if she can find anomalies that would indicate he's using his "legitimate" businesses as a front for money laundering. Vargano, meanwhile, is behaving more like a James Bond villain than a classical movie Mafioso; virtually the only times we actually see him are when he's lounging on his yacht with two anonymous bimbos in tow to service some of his other needs. (The fact that he seems to be able to do this year-round in Pittsburgh, of all places, itself requires a certain suspension of disbelief.)
Murphy manages to get Kate to leave her job as a professor and join his task force even though the last time she worked for him she nearly got killed and the witness she had developed was killed. At first they work out of Murphy's own offices until a Black hit man (Dennis LaFond), a confederate of Taylor's, disguises himself as a janitor and sets a bomb in the storage room holding the files Murphy and his staff have assembled about Vargano and his questionable — and, they hope, provably illegal — business activities. Kate, the obviously intended victim, is uninjured because she went out to replenish the group's coffee supply as they worked into the night, but her assistant Vivian (Allison Brennan) is injured and ends up in the hospital. So Murphy orders his crew to leave the office and move into a safe house where they can be protected from Vargano's thugs, and one of the three police officers assigned to Kate's detail, Carl (Jon MacLaren), bails out on the ground that he's too concerned about his family to want to work a job that might get himself killed. The two cops that end up with Kate in the safe house are hunky young Detective Daniel Leaton (Scott Gibson) and older, stouter, taller and more avuncular, but still attractive, Greg Nealand (Peter Michael Dillon), who worms out of Kate the information that she's single and then declares his love for her. As the film progresses (in the manner of a disease), Murphy becomes aware that there is a "mole" in his operation who's leaking Vargano and his organization all the information about his investigation, including the identities of his potential witnesses (so Vargano can have Taylor and his Black confederate kill them) and the businesses he owns that Murphy and Kate are looking at — and we become aware that one of the two cops hiding out with Kate in the safe house, where they've set a burglar alarm so she literally can't leave, is the mole.
"Trust No One" isn't a bad movie; it's just dull, and while Vargano and Taylor are convincing figures of menace (enough to make me wish the writers had emphasized the bad guys more and the comparatively boring good guys less), overall it's simply not a very interesting movie. It's full of sporadic twitches of action that seem to be there merely because it occurred to Crawford and the McKernans that white-collar crime is boring to watch, and the efforts to catch white-collar criminals are also boring — there are way too many scenes of Kate and others poring over manila folders containing spreadsheets and other financial documents, and like all movies about white-collar crime this requires endless explanations about just what all those numbers mean and why what the bad guys are doing is illegal. There are a few atmospheric shots of Pittsburgh by night — in fact Crawford likes to take his cameras overhead and give views of the city's night lights just as a relief from the boredom of his and the McKernans' plot — and an overall sense that Trust No One might actually have been a better movie with more compelling direction and writing, and more of a focus on the villains than the heroes.
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