User Reviews

Talking to a family friend about my dad getting the Spanish Horror Timecrimes,I got told about a very similar movie starring Melissa George called Triangle. While finding out details between the two,I spotted a film starring George which has not come out on UK DVD, that was about to leave Netflix UK,which led to me getting set to witness the betrayal.

The plot:

Driving to the airport to pick up her husband Kevin,Jamie and her son Michael get caught in a crash that knocks them out. Waking up,Jamie finds herself being held hostage in a secret location. Screaming out to ask the kidnappers what they want,Jamie soon learns that Kevin has betrayed her trust.

View on the film:

Held captive in one room, Melissa George gives a captivating performance as Jamie. Terrified over the hostage takers watching her every move,George subtly expresses the sharp determination that grips Jamie as the betrayal becomes clear. Speaking behind a door for the opening 30 minutes, Oded Fehr gives a wonderfully creepy performance as Alec/"The Voice",whose voice is given a calculating menace by Fehr.

Initially looking like a "Torture Horror" flick,writer/director Amanda Gusack puts the saw down,and turns the screws to a psychological Thriller. Keeping Jamie in one room,the screenplay by Gusack brings to light brief flashback that delve into the things Kevin has kept out of Jamie's sight. Keeping the dialogue brittle, Gusack makes each revelation Alec makes one that coils Jamie's sense of betrayal. Locked in the room with Jamie,Gusack and cinematographer Roger Vernon cover the walls in a metallic grey cutting Jamie off from the world,as Jamie starts to plan her own betrayal.

****SPOILERS**** Finding herself-after surviving a car accident- locked up in this bunker-like sound and bullet proof room Jamie Taylor, Melissa George, is confronted by this faceless voice, standing outside, about her husband Kevin, Christopher Campbell. It seems that honest and hard working, at the restaurant that he and Jamie own, Kevin was involved in dirty money laundering activities for the syndicated! Shocked that Kevin would have anything to do with a thing like that Jamie is also told that he in fact had stolen 40 million dollars of the syndicate's illegal-heroin-drug money. If that money is not returned within the next 12 hours the voice tells Jamie her son six year-old Michael, Connor Christopher Levins, will be history!

It's now up to Jamie to find out just where the money is hidden by listening to a milk crate full of audio tapes, secretly recorded at the Taylor house, and find a clue in them to what Kevin did with the stolen cash. That's before the voice's, who calls himself Alex, boss the mysterious Falco shows up, with a number of hit-men, the next morning and, with the money not there, has both her and little Michael iced.

You can't quite make out what Alex is trying to get out of Jamie in that he keeps changing his story to what exactly Kevin did! To the point where you expect that there's something more to his mentally and physically torturing poor Jamie then what, Kevin's double-crossing the syndicate, he's telling her. The movie "The Betrayed" goes on and on with Jamie wracking her brains out in her listening to the boring and almost inaudible tapes Alex gave her. And at the same time trying to figure out what the tapes tell her, in secret coded massages, in where her husband Kevin hid Falco's 40 million dollars. There's also the added attraction of having one of Alex's henchmen Rathe, Donald Adams, trying to take advantage of Jaime when Alex is outside getting some fresh air, from his dark and smelly bunker-like workplace, and a bite to eat! Rathe in the end gets blown away by an outraged Alex when he catches him with his pants down in trying to rape Jamie when he's supposed to be guarding her!

In the end we finally get to see what both Alex, by taking off his hood, and Falco, by just showing up, really look like. Which, surprising as it was, doesn't really explain what Jamie's husband Kevin had to do in screwing the two out of their 40 million dollars?

****SPOILER ALERT**** As for Kevin, the real mystery man in the film, he shows up unexpectedly at the very end of the movie to tie all the loose ends together only to end up making things even more confusing then they already were! Not in Kevin explaining his connection to the Falco Mob but in how he completely underestimated in how his wife Jamie, a whiz at numbers crossword puzzles and the internet, was able to figured out what his real intentions in this whole confusing movie really were!

*Contains Spoilers*

This is a really bad movie, completely ludicrous with an absolutely delirious script, with impossible characters and pretty stupid situations.

Melissa's character (executed with unimpressive acting) really deserves to die for acting so stupidly, but in order to get the lax thriller going, where puzzles and enigmas are frivolous, the character survives thanks to a hit-man that loves humanity or at least Melissa George.

Apparently the mafia lost some money and wants it back, and Melissa for some reason is the key to get it back, however, unlike more realistic portrayals of organized crime like in The Sopranos, here, the Mafia likes to play CIA, visiting hostages and walking slowly around them while saying some faux-poetic words about death.

Character after character we meet, is utterly risible for being a complete caricature impossible in real life, but I'd bet persons that have been prisoners for real, wished their kidnappers were as dumb and slow in their movements.

Awfully predictable, it is obvious way before the first half of the movie, that the writers will bend the laws of physics and time in order for Melissa George to survive and will only spoil her efforts in order the make the film a tad longer or add more fake suspense.

Needless to say, you'll have to turn off your brain if you want a shot at enjoying this film.

As a minimalist, ultra low-budget (then again, if my friends and I made this with the budget listed here, we may well have had $3.4 million left in the kitty for our next flick), virtually one-room set film, THE BETRAYED sort of commands attention for its 98-minute running time. If its stated setting was Burnaby, British Columbia, the viewer could think: "Oh yeah, these keystone crooks are kind of plausible in a region where the populace evidently is NOT aware that their national guard won independence 141 years earlier, since they haven't updated a name that specifically denotes their ancestors' colonial masters from centuries earlier. Let's give these confused Britons and Colombians the benefit of the doubt, and rate this tale from backwards Burnaby at 7 of 10, since having all the main characters behaving as clueless dolts would not pass the suspension-of-disbelief test for Philadelphia--or Peoria, but who really knows if or when the 21st Century level of civilization will reach Burnaby."

However, with their understandably massive inferiority complex, the Canadian filmmakers have once again chosen for about the millionth time to try to foist off the doings of unsophisticated blunderers as actions which become totally incredible for mobsters, computer science majors, and police officers who are products of American public schools. Ten people are shot to death during THE BETRAYED, with the title no doubt meant to refer to how each one submits to his death like a sheep going to slaughter--even the character who has already gunned down two cops and six fellow mobsters. If you asked them WHY they were so blind-sided, their only possible reply would be, "because the script betrayed me." If you watch BLOOD SIMPLE or FARGO by the Coen brothers, you will see that master filmmakers leave themselves an out when there is lots of misguided mayhem, by portraying their characters as hicks operating in the boondocks. Conversely, Coppola would not make a savvy urban mob boss (think Marlon Brando in GODFATHER) stare into an underling's revolver for half a minute, doing some sort of internal Hamlet "to be, or not to be" monologue, when they could save themselves by just pulling their own trigger! Sure, Philadelphia had Rocky, but even Cousin Paulie could have gotten the drop on these Burnaby bums.

I usually don't talk about reviews by other users but a reviewer of this movie has said about another user that he could be the director's ex to review it just one star. Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Anyway, the movie wasn't that bad. The acting by almost everyone was very good. I just have the problem with the script. It wasn't badly written but I just found a few things stupid.

Spoiler Alert: 1. The brick in the room comes off conveniently for her to check next room. 2. No huge twists. From the start of the movie we are told that the husband is a betrayer and after that, that fact never changes throughout the movie. When he finally talks to her, maybe we are supposed to think he wasn't wrong but he mentions the money way too early. 3. I may be confused but why won't Alec type the username & password himself instead of writing it to her? Maybe he didn't have enough time? 4. Transfer happens at the last minute: Things like these have been done so many times in the movies that they don't thrill me any more. 5. Then the site conveniently goes down for maintenance after all that: Awesome. 6. All that & she managed to change the password. 7. Everything (transfer & all) is done right before Falco arrives: Another "action done at the last minute" thing. 7. Alek tries to shoot Falco & it seems that she ducks to avoid a bullet although she's very close & if she got her arm shot, she gets up without even cringing? 8. Alec conveniently lives on after being shot so he could talk to Jamie in the end and/or is not shot again by Kevin even after opening his mouth.

But other than those things the movie was very interesting & I didn't feel like turning it off. There were a few things I liked too, but I won't mention them.

You'll have to suspend disbelief in just about everything you know about in connection to the way things really work in order to remotely accept this film. (Spoiler Alert: Her husband is a scumbag!)

Why? The premise completely reduces police officers as untraceable dummies that roam around without any oversight and support of any kind. An assumption that website technology is rarely understood by normal people. (My 8-year-old could break this film's online code)

The Executive Summary that got this ridiculous script green-lighted should have been the "Treatment" for a better film. In short-It was so unbelievable that I couldn't continue watching without hitting the FF button. In short of my short: it was stupid!

BTW: The cop at the end was so completely unbelievable that I can't even write this review without smashing something!

Enjoy-just smoke a bowl first!

Peace-and-Love.