Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie Review

Murder, he'd like to write.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 22, 2015

Every time I stumble across an old rerun of Murder, She Wrote, I can’t help but wonder why any given character in the show doesn’t run in the opposite direction as soon as celebrated mystery writer Jessica Fletcher enters the picture. After all, it goes without saying that once Jessica is around, whether in her sweet little village of Cabot Cove, or, later in the series’ run, any number of more metropolitan locales, someone is going to end up dead, and not just dead, but murdered. Weekly murder mystery shows perhaps have a somewhat firmer grasp on “reality” (such as it exists in episodic television, anyway) when people like attorneys or policemen are the anchor of the show (think Perry Mason, Law and Order or CSI). Having a writer be the fulcrum of a seemingly unending array of nasty killings perhaps stretches credulity to the breaking point. Best Seller doesn’t quite go to the extremes that the long ago Angela Lansbury television outing did, but it still posits an author who gets caught up in a rather unlikely scenario when a professional hitman approaches him with an offer to spill the beans about his nefarious stock in trade, a “memoir” which will no doubt be a sensational success and vault the author to the top of, yes, the best seller lists. It probably helps that Larry Cohen’s fairly fanciful screenplay at least gives the author a backstory as an erstwhile cop who has gone on to greater reward as a crime novelist. Perhaps appropriately “pulpy,” Best Seller offers a good showcase for stars Brian Dennehy and James Woods, but it never really comes off as anything other than an overheated fantasy that pretends to be “ripped from the headlines,” but which plays as a resolute piece of fiction.

Richard M. Nixon may or may not have been the mastermind behind the Watergate affair, but he’s front and center—or at least his face is—in a daring robbery which opens Best Seller circa 1972, just when Nixon was about to cruise to one of the most overwhelming landslide victories in the annals of American politics (though we all know how that landslide ultimately worked out). A bunch of guys wearing Nixon masks show up at a police evidence locker and make off with something, though they leave a trail of carnage in their wake, including a seriously wounded officer named Dennis Meechum (Brian Dennehy).

As the film details in a pixellated "newsprint" montage that gives that "ripped from the headlines" ambience, Meechum survives his wounds and turns his travails into a best selling book, becoming a celebrity author - cop in the process. As the film segues forward several years, the erstwhile beat cop is now a much lauded detective who has a lucrative writing career going at the same time. His policing may be slightly hampered by a slight gimp in his gait from that old wound, but as a chase sequence early in the film proves, Meechum can still give halting chase when there's a bad guy to be caught. On this particular occasion, though, Meechum finds himself tailed by a weird and nattily dressed guy who seems to know who Dennis is, even if Dennis doesn't have a clue about him.

Unfortunately time has not been entirely kind to Meechum. He’s a widower trying to navigate some roiling waters with his daughter Holly (Alison Balson) while also dealing with a propensity to drink too much. It turns out he has even more problems, and it’s none other than that weird, nattily dressed guy who tells him so, after some intervening melodrama that lets Dennis know he’s up against a potential psychopath. Cleve (James Woods) has obviously done his research on Dennis, though some cynics may wonder how he seems to know Dennis’ innermost thoughts. That telepathic ability aside, Cleve approaches Dennis with the opportunity to overcome one of those aforementioned problems—an inability to write. Cleve tells Dennis that there’s an incredible story that not only deserves telling, it virtually guarantees Dennis a perch atop the bestseller lists. That story is of course Cleve’s own, as it turns out he’s self-reportedly a professional hitman. Dennis has his doubts, which actually propel the probably too long middle section of this film.

While there’s a bit of finger pointing between Cleve and a ruthless corporate impresario named David Madlock (Paul Shenar) about which one of them is the real bad guy, what ultimately intrigues Dennis is a connection to that long ago burglary with the Nixon masks. That plot element provides just enough motive for Dennis in what is frankly otherwise a completely outlandish set of vignettes that at least gives Woods the chance to indulge in some of his patented goofy hyperbolism. For a character supposedly as generally stressed and needy as Dennis is, he takes an awful lot of convincing that what Cleve's telling him is the truth, something that at least gives the film the chance to wander down several garden paths as Cleve details his nefarious past.

Up to this point there’s enough of an admittedly tenuous grasp on solid thriller territory to generate a fair amount of suspense and opportunities for Dennehy and Woods to have some fun interactions (the film almost seems to want to be a buddy comedy at times, albeit a kind of weirdly dark one). But several ludicrous (and perhaps even more lamentably, predictable) plot machinations in the third act give us a needless damsel in distress and other clichés that completely undercut the film’s attempts at trashy grittiness.

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Best Seller is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The opening several minutes of the film, which include opticals like the credits and that later newsprint montage sequence mentioned above in the main body of the review, look pretty rough, with a very heavy layer of grain, overall fuzziness and unappealing contrast leading to things like crush when black police uniforms come up against shadowed backgrounds. But once the first post-credits sequence starts, things perk up instantly, with a finer grain field and noticeably improved contrast and color. The outdoor sequences, as with the first dockside scenes where Dennis meets Cleve, or later in Dennis' backyard with his daughter, offer commendable clarity and a nice reproduction of a natural looking palette. There are still occasional issues in some of the darker sequences with minimal shadow detail, but overall the transfer provides ample levels of detail. Elements show typical age related signs of wear and tear, with a fair amount of scratches, nicks, dirt and white flecks popping up. There are no issues with image instability, and as with most Olive releases, no signs of artificial digital tweaking of the image harvest.

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Best Seller's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track offers good support for the film's dialogue, sound effects like gunfire, and the synth heavy score by Jay Ferguson. Everything is presented cleanly and clearly, with very good prioritization. Fidelity is excellent and there are no issues of any kind to address in this review.

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:44)

Best Seller Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Almost unapologetically silly at times, and with a kind of goofy humor lying just beneath the surface, Best Seller is needlessly overheated, especially in its third act, but it's also generally a lot of fun courtesy of the excellent interplay between Dennehy and Woods. Director John Flynn never really pauses on the inconsistencies long enough to make them a major concern in any case. The video on this release is occasionally rough looking, but with expectations for both it and the film in general set at appropriate levels, Best Seller comes Recommended.