Roselyn Sánchez

  • Death of a Vegas Showgirl (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) There are a few layers to dig into when considering Death of a Vegas Showgirl. If you’re near-randomly picking it to watch, hoping for a slightly seedy crime thriller, the first layer is disappointment. Rather than a soft-core thriller or a quasi-noir crime story, this is a made-for-Lifetime TV movie, so expect the usual graceless cinematography, shaky acting, insipid direction, rough technical values (ugh, those “special effects”) and by-the-number screenplay, at least in the film’s first two thirds. As a story, it’s not much – an aging Vegas dancer is given one more chance to prove herself in a prestige role, and gets involved in a tempestuous relationship with another dancer. The issue of those events is right in the spoiler-filled title of the film. Roselyn Sanchez looks great in the lead role but isn’t a particularly subtle actress –still, she comes out of the film better than everyone else. The Vegas surroundings are under-exploited (fittingly enough, since much of the film was shot in Vancouver) and anyone who watches the film hoping for some of that Vegas mystique will be brought back to the desperate behind-the-scenes lives required for Las Vegas’ glitz to exist. But the film does take an unusual turn toward its conclusion that is best explained by one thing not necessarily obvious if you’re just stumbling on the film: it’s not only based on a 2010 true story (the murder of Debbie Flores-Narvaez), but one that was still in legal proceedings by the time the film was put together. As a result, the film does not commit to a single story, but presents four different versions of how things may have occurred in order to keep the production from legal problems if the appeal process overturned the initial conviction. That’s more than slightly unusual for a Lifetime film, even if the rest of the movie faithfully follows the usual formula for that kind of thing. What’s perhaps most impressive about Death of a Vegas Showgirl, in fact, is that they managed to cram a real-life story into such a formula, inventing characters and making a dramatic plot out of true crime. Your reaction to the film is liable to span everything from disappointment to amazement, depending on how you choose to see it.

  • Traffik (2018)

    Traffik (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2021) It would be an exaggeration to put Traffik in the “when bad movies happen to good actors” category — I like Paula Patton a lot, but I have seen some less-than-stellar performances from her. Nor would she be the only one to slum in this bad movie: Considering that Traffik sports an intriguing cast that includes such notable character actors as Omar Epps, Roselyn Sánchez, Luke Goss, Missi Pyle and William Fichtner, there are plenty of resumés skipping over their involvement in Traffik these days. A more appropriate category for the film would be “exploitative garbage that attaches itself to a Serious Issue in an unconvincing bid for respectability,” because while it tries to be about human trafficking, it’s nothing more than a cheap sensationalist thriller/horror film. Ignore the meaningless “based on a true story” and the equally meaningless inflated statistics that close the film — Traffik is really about that old Hollywood chestnut: the woman in danger from cartoonishly evil antagonists. The set dressing may be contemporary (Patton plays a journalist who gets embroiled in a sexual trafficking ring led by—what else?—racist bikers) but the plot beats are as old as exploitation itself. The point here is cheap horror-movie scares, not particularly well executed by writer-director Deon Taylor. This is exceptionally familiar stuff if you’re used to the bottom tier of the horror genre: the only thing of note is the better-than-average cast. Which, yes, does bring us back to “when bad movies happen to good actors” as a shorthand for Traffik — maybe not Oscar-calibre actors, but ones that definitely deserve better. The added lesson here is that if you’re going to wrap your film in hot-button issues, you better bring something more to the table than exploiting those issues for thrills.