Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Lack of good storyline.

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This Canadian quickie, starring mostly Canadian actors, deserves a look-see, even with Daniel Baldwin on board. Nathan Fillion plays a writer who has lost a child and moves with his wife to a small town that turns out to have more secrets than Carter has liver pills. The incredibly sexy Chandra West plays the wife and the even sexier Emmanuele Vaughier plays a femme fatale who intrudes in their lives. Baldwin is the corrupt town mayor. Vaughier and Fillion share a lakeside seduction scene that is hotter than hell, and a reminder why you don't usually see this film running in the daytime. It's A TOWN WITHOUT PITY for the new millennium, and holds up fairly well on a rewatch. I know it was not intentional, but there is a a very funny foot chase scene a little more than halfway through involving Fillion and the local sheriff. This ain't THE HOT SPOT and Fillion isn't Don Johnson, but it will do for what looks like a made-for-cable movie. Vaughier (or West, for that matter) is welcome to drug and seduce me any day.

Let's see if I can remember the initial details at the beginning of this "opus." A young couple are going to a cabin owned by his late father. In an opening scene, she is dreaming of being underwater with some sort of plastic barrier preventing her from emerging. This is something like, say, a 10th-grade student might write as a scene in a sophomoric attempt to copy Fellini's "8-1/2." But it's a perfectly appropriate beginning for this flick, which looks like something Ed Wood would have done if he'd had a bit larger and better-looking cast, and enough more in budget to film in British Columbia with better equipment. Other than that, this movie doesn't exceed what he could have achieved, but without the underlying humor and "so-bad-it's-good" quality of Ed's works.The lead couple are broke. They have fled Gotham to recuperate from a family tragedy. She's contemplating suicide, and to regain their financial status, he's here to complete the great American novel, and thereby they obviously hope to restore themselves both financially and emotionally.Things get off to a bad start when the lead male/author goes out in a boat to begin writing, but the pages of his text (which are lying in an open box on the boat's seat) blow away into the lake. He returns to the cabin, and finding a loaded shotgun (wife had loaded and aimed at her chin in contemplation of whacking herself), declares they've both had a bad day.She indicates a need to have something to go with their rice and beans, and he departs with the shotgun, in search of a duck for main course. He almost immediately stumbles upon a policeman who drags a young woman, who is bound and gagged, from the trunk of his vehicle. About to shoot her point-blank, the backwoods gendarme thinks he hears something, so decides to bash her head with a rock instead. The lead then confronts the corrupt lawman, and ignoring the latter's admonition not to interfere with "police business," offs him with his shotgun. Along the way he subsequently discovers another body, 200K in cash, and some racy pictures of the young woman and the mayor (played by the most prominent name in this film, Heaven-Help-Us, Daniel Baldwin). Soon, we have scenes where the hero is attending a charity auction at the town's library, while his wife chats with the mysterious young woman he had rescued, as the latter cleans-up in the tub. They chat as if they were two sorority sisters getting ready to go to a theme party. At the library, he's introduced as a prominent author and honored guest at the auction. Presumably, the dead lawman is simply still just drawing flies in the woods.And so it continues, and the remaining plot occurrences and storyline represent time capsule examples of the meaning of the words "banal," "vacuous," and (again) "sophomoric."All of this is about as gripping as a "Three Stooges" offering. And we all know the "Stooges" writers weren't interested in creating great plots; the main purpose was to create situations where Moe could slap Larry and Curly, hit them on their heads with a mallet, and poke their eyes. The end purpose here is anyone's guess.

**SPOILERS** Moving into his dad's old hunting cottage outside of Reedsville Robert and his wife Molly are trying to put their lives back together since the tragic death of their daughter. Robert feels that the peace and quite of the country would give him the inspiration to write the great American Novel and get both him and Molly out of debt from the expenses of keeping their daughter alive on life-support. Molly's depression starts to become suicidal and one afternoon she loads a shotgun and tries to blow her brains out. Robert, coming home after being out on the lake writing, sees that the gun was loaded and, knowing Molly's unstable state of mind, flips out and runs into the woods with the shotgun to get his thoughts together.Sitting alone in a clearing Robert sees a police car pull up and the sheriff pulls out this young woman and is about to smash her head in with rock when he interrupts the obvious attempted murder by blowing, after warning him to stop, the cop sheriff Dodd away. Taking the young woman home to get her patched up, she was badly beaten up by Dodd, both Robert & Molly find out that the woman, Rae Baines, worked in the office of the mayor of Reedsville Mayor Block. It's later when Robert goes to dispose of Dodd's body and patrol car that he finds a bag with $200,000.00 and a bunch of photos of Rea and the mayor in a number of compromising positions; was she blackmailing him and Sheffif Dodd working for Mayor Block was to kill her on orders from up high to shut Rea up for good?The movie "Waters Edge" goes on with Rea manipulating the somewhat foolish Robert in trying to split him up from his wife Molly and the blackmail money. Molly later finds out, at the Reedsville Public Libery, that Rea was actually working with her husband Bobbie, the town's official photographer, who was later found dead in the trunk of Sheriff Dodd's patrol car. The two were the ones involved in blackmailing Mayor Block not this local power and control freak T. Wallace, who runs the towns feed store, as Rea told Robert.Later Robert gets taken back to town by Officer Campball for questioning in Dodd's death. It's then when he quickly realizes that he's being set up, by the town's mayor and is henchmen like Campball & Wallace, to not only take the rap for Dodd's murder, who Robert shot in self-defense. But thats not real reason for his troubles with the corrupt Mayor Block & Co. It's the $200,000.00 in blackmail money and photos that Robert has hidden in his cottage that is. Meanwhile back at the cottage Rea, showing her true colors, has the helpful and kind-hearted Molly knocked out and tied up, after an eye-popping and ferocious cat-fight with her, and dropped into the lake with a heavy weight tied to her body and left to drown. Robert who made a run from it from both Campball and T.Wallace is captured and made to go back to his cottage and get the money and incriminating photos that the mayor wants so badly. It's then that Robert finds out that Rea, who was there looking for the same things, is not the innocent soul that she said she was. It's then that he has it out with both her and the Mayor and his corrupt crew of law enforcers in the movie's fiery conclusion. There's a lot of holes in the plot of "Waters Edge" that make the story a bit hard to swallow as well as the very unconvincing and ham acting of both Emmanuelle Vaugler & Daniel Baldwin as Rea and the Mayor. But actor Nathan Fillion as Robert keeps your mind off them by his taking the role he has, as an innocent man on the run, deadly serious and not trying to sleep walk his way through the film in order to just collect a check.

"Water's Edge" screenwriter Craig Brewer wrote and directed the very low-budget, very compelling and brilliant "The Poor and Hungry", so that was all I really needed to know to put this picture at the top of my rental que. I'm a little disappointed. This is only a formulae thriller, perhaps just a cut above average, with decent casting and direction. I can see the Craig Brewer touch in the screenplay: relatively interesting characters, mostly believable plot considering the contrivances necessary for a formulae thriller, and good dialogue. I will still keep an eye on this remarkable talent for another unforgettable picture like his first. Some day. In the meantime I know you gotta pay the rent.