Ballard, on Prime Video

Investigating cold cases should help prevent future crimes, in a “broken windows” kind of way, because if someone got away with murder once, they will presumably be more likely to kill again. Nevertheless, Det. Renee Ballard’s assignment to the Cold Case division was unambiguously intended as a punishment. Yet, several of her cold cases turn out to be very hot in creators Michael Connelly & Michael Alaimo’s 10-episode first season of Ballard, which premiers tomorrow on Prime Video.

Ballard had a conflict with her ex-partner Det. Robert Olivas that he won. Banished to the Cold Case squad, she and fellow squad member, formerly retired Reserve Officer Thomas Laffont, close their first case during the prologue, but the messiness leaves them even more in the doghouse. Frankly, Captain Bercham only wants them investigating one case, the unsolved murder of the younger sister of the city councilman Jake Pearlman, who allocated the funds for their department. He clearly thinks Ballard works for him and wants results yesterday. However, Pearlman learns to respect her dedication and instincts when Ballard discovers his sister was murdered by an unknown serial killer.

Naturally, Bercham wants to transfer the case back to Homicide, but Ballard’s team has Pearlman’s confidence and has been running conspicuous circles around her old colleagues. As a further complication, Ballard has another season-long case that she must keep close to her vest: a cold case murder that leads to a cabal of crooked gun-running cops in league with a nasty drug cartel. Besides her team, Ballard only trusts retired Det. Harry Bosch, a sporadic guest-star, who anchors the series to the Bosch-verse.

Titus Welliver’s infrequent but significant appearances are a fun bonus, but Maggie Q more than carries the series as the title character. Frankly, her intensity level might even eclipse Welliver’s and she is almost aa cool. She also comes into the series with massive action cred, which serves her well. Connelly, Alaimo, and the rest of their writers’ room really put Ballard through wringer, but she handles all the angst quite convincingly.

Maggie Q also develops nice chemistry with her team, notably including the recognizable John Carroll Lynch playing it largely straight as Laffont, and Michael Mosley, as reserve officer Ted Rawls, whose stock rises considerably as he earns Ballard’s confidence. Similarly, Noah Bean delivers another memorable supporting turn, navigating the councilman’s surprisingly dramatic arc. Amy Hill probably comes the closest to comic relief as “Tutu,” but the grandmother-granddaughter relationship is appealingly affectionate.

Flashback: Stalker (Pilot)

Lt. Beth Davis and Det. Jack Larsen should be a great team when it comes to sleuthing out stalkers, because she is being stalked and he is a stalker (but not hers). At least that is how it looks during the pilot of Maggie Q’s 2014 procedural. She carried it well, but it was considered a little too intense for network TV—maybe not surprisingly so, since it was created by Kevin Williamson, the screenwriter of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Unfortunately, it is hard to compare it with her new series, Ballard, since it currently is not available for streaming, but it certainly showed Maggie Q could credibly portray a driven police investigator.

Frankly, Davis might have even more baggage than Ballard. The pilot only hints at her backstory, but judging from the way she secures her apartment each night, she clearly intends to be ready for an intruder. Ironically, handling stalkers is her job as the leader of the LAPD’s Threat Assessment Unit (TAU). Unfortunately, she often gets called into cases much too late, like the woman whose stalker immolates her during the prologue. That was a rough start that earned the series a reputation for brutality, especially by network standards.

Frankly, the pilot shows an inclination the straddle the boundary dividing dark serial killer/stalker thrillers from horror that should have appealed to Williamson’s fans. Indeed, the episode’s primary case is seriously creepy. Awkwardly, instead of resolving the second case, wealthy college weirdo Perry Whitley only shifts his obsessive attention in an inconvenient direction.

The Family Plan, on Apple TV+

Any former assassin who lets the phony passports in his bug-out bag expire must be slipping. Indeed, Dan Morgan got way too comfortable in his new life as a husband, father, a salesman of “certified pre-owned” cars. Inevitably, his old life comes looking for him in Simon Cellan Jones’s The Family Plan, which premieres today on Apple TV+.

“Dan Morgan,” as he now calls himself, has convinced his wife Jessica that he is safe and boring. Then, somebody tries to kill him while he is shopping for groceries with their little rug rat. Realizing his old boss has found him, Morgan tries to convince his wife, their college-bound daughter Nina, and moody teen gamer son Kyle to leave on a spur-of-the-moment road trip to Las Vegas, where his old crony Augie will hook them up with fresh new identities.

Since he is afraid of how they will react to the truth, Morgan makes a great (and hopefully comedic) effort to shield them from the dangers pursuing them. Of course, his family starts to appreciate Morgan’s new spontaneous side. However, they are not so sure about his new found aversion to smart phones and social media.

Basically, screenwriter David Coggeshall starts with a familiar premise not radically dissimilar from Mr. and Mrs. Smith, True Lies, or various Korean rom-coms like My Girlfriend is an Agent, but he tries to mine it more for family-friendly comedy rather than action-driven thrills. There are a few decent fight sequences, featuring action veterans like Maggie Q, Lateef Crowder, and the star himself, Mark Wahlberg. However, the overall tone feels like it was targeted towards a younger demographic than even the PG-13 rating would suggest.

Neil LaBute’s Fear the Night

Usually, rural folk are more respectful of veterans. Creepy Perry thinks his attitude is okay, because he considers himself a vet too, but Tess can tell he never saw a day of combat. She is the real deal, so Perry should have given her a wide berth. Instead, he and a few friends lay siege to her parents’ country home, looking for a cache of drug money in Neil LaBute’s Fear the Night, which releases this Friday in theaters and on VOD.

Nobody in the family had been to their parents’ old place in years, but Tess’s judgy sister Beth still wanted to have their little sister Rose’s bachelorette party for there anyway. When they stop at the general store, Perry and his knuckle-dragging sidekicks try to hassle the ladies, but Tess is having none of it. When they get to the house, the care-takers seem a little dodgy. So much so, Tess starts snooping around their cottage, overhearing some of their drug business as a result.

When night falls, Perry and his goons start shooting arrows into the house. Tess isn’t sure whether the “caretakers” are with them or not. It is pretty clear Tess is the only one the bachelorette party can count on, even though they have been whining and snarking at her all night.

You would never know from the pedestrian look and vibe of Fear the Night that LaBute was once considered a major voice in drama and independent cinema. Then the Nic Cage Wicker Man remake happened. This is generally watchable, largely thanks to Maggie Q, who is a highly credible action star. However, LaBute never cranks up the violence enough for fans of home invasion-revenge horror and his gender warfare dialogue lacks the bite of his 1990s career-defining work.

Slumber: Maggie Q Treats Sleep Paralysis

Many people suffering from sleep paralysis report seeing the ominous Freddy Krueger-like “Hat Man.” If your subconscious is more inclined towards old European folklore, you might see the Night Hag (the source of the word “nightmare”) instead. It seems that nocturnal bitty is tormenting a family seeking treatment from, Dr. Alice Arnolds, a sleep disorder specialist. The case hits close to home when the behavior of their young son starts to remind Arnolds of her late little brother in Jonathan Hopkins’ Slumber (trailer here) which releases today on DVD.

Years ago, Arnolds was powerless to prevent her sleepwalking little brother’s fatal defenestration. It was like some sinister force pulled him out. Hence her specialty. She assumes sullen Daniel Morgan is her latest patient, but his sister Emily and parents Charlie and Sarah are also desperate for treatment. The first night of observation does not go well, especially when circumstances lead her colleague Malcolm to suspect the father of abuse. Of course, Arnolds can sense there is something uncanny afoot, starting with her increasingly disturbed dreams. Facing up to the likely existence of the Night Hag, Arnolds seeks answers from Amado, the spooky old world grandfather of the clinic’s janitor.

If nothing else, Slumber should be a future trivia question at Doctor Who conventions, because it co-stars Sylvester McCoy (the Seventh Doctor) as Amado and Sam Troughton, the grandson of Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor) as Charlie Morgan. In fact, McCoy is so off-the-hook nutty, he almost single-handedly rescues the film from its doldrums.

Maggie Q gives a decently sensitive performance as the dedicated Dr. Arnolds. However, the rest of the Arnoldses and most of the Morgans are hopelessly bland. Frankly, the film clicks the most when she is doing psychological stuff with the slightly sardonic Malcolm, played by William Hope, who nicely compliments her.

Maggie Q is a telegenic star and the largely British cast gives the film an illusion of classiness (yet, somehow our New York State tax credits still helped finance it). Alas, Hopkins’ execution is rather flat-footed, largely ditching the early hints of ancient folklore in favor of awkward Dreamscape-esque scenes. There has been a mini-boomlet of sleep paralysis horror movies, but Rodney Ascher’s documentary, The Nightmare, the film that started the trend, is still the scariest of the pack. Instructive as a missed opportunity, but not recommended, Slumber releases today on DVD.

The Foul-Mouthed Operatives of Operation: Endgame

Those cloak-and-dagger types are so villainous. They always want to eliminate America’s mortal foes. Of course, that just won’t do under the new Obama administration. It is time to reward our enemies and punish our allies, which leaves a cabal of old school assassins out in the cold in Fouad Mikati’s Obama-era spy spoof Operation: Endgame (trailer here), now available on DVD.

It is inauguration day, but something is definitely amiss in the underground bunker shared by Alpha and Omega, two rival black ops agencies deliberately established to counter each other—a scheme that makes sense only in Endgame’s paranoid world. Still, it supplies a decent set-up for some rude but admittedly funny office place humor. In fact, the first half hour zings along quite nicely as the explicit, politically incorrect insults fly back and forth between the assassins.

Unfortunately, it is blindingly obvious Mikati considers anyone who is not a lifetime subscriber to Mother Jones an unredeemable psychopath. Naturally, all matter of evil skullduggery is ascribed to Bush and Cheney, while the film wildly exaggerates the popularity of the incoming President, even though buyers’ remorse was by then already setting in.

The McGuffin kicking things off is botched operation to blow-up the warehouse that held all the evidence against the outgoing administration, conveniently centralized in one location. When it goes sour, it somehow ignites a death struggle between the Alpha and Omega factions. While both teams derive their codenames from tarot cards you can tell Alpha is evil because their ranks include an African-American Republican and a Southern girl who attended a mega-church. Subtly thy name is not Mikati (nor that of screenwriters Sam Levinson and Brian Watanabe). By contrast, Omega is a somewhat likeable collection of drunks, the very hot “High Priestess,” and the new guy who got tagged with “The Fool” on his rough first day on the job.

As Alpha and Omega go at each others’ throats they must improvise weaponry from common office supplies, leading to a few more grisly laughs. Indeed, Endgame could have been quite entertaining if it was not so intent on grinding its ideological axe. Rob Corddry (formerly of the Daily Show) proves to be a master of foul-mouthed insult humor as the DTing “Chariot.” Bob Odenkirk also deadpans his way to some decent laughs as “Emperor.”

Looking pretty scary, Ellen Barkin chews the scenery rather shamelessly as “Empress.” However, Maggie Q is indeed quite attractive as “High Priestess,” while also bringing some legitimate action movie cred to the proceedings. Unfortunately, Zach Galifianakis is largely wasted as the anti-social “Hermit.”

A truly squandered opportunity, Endgame potentially could have been a very funny espionage movie send-up (albeit darkly so). While Corddry and Maggie Q give the film a boast of energy whenever they appear on screen (for very different reasons), it ultimately sabotages itself with the constant halting distractions of its contemptuous political score settling. As a result, the cynical Endgame already feels dated. A real coulda-shoulda film, it releases on DVD today.