A GOOD MARRIAGE is another recent horror/thriller based on a story by Stephen King, and again it's one of the worst adaptations of his work. The story is drab and drawn out, dragging on forever, essentially a two-hander between Joan Allen's suspicious housewife and Anthony LaPaglia as her mysterious husband. What plays out is anything but interesting; a dragged out story of serial killing and cover-up, one that attempts to shock with twists and the like but is forever boring. Allen is unrecognisable underneath tons of plastic surgery that makes it hard to show any kind of expression whatsoever, and Stephen Lang is wasted in an underwritten supporting role. The only thing this extremely poor film induces is sleep.

There is no doubt in my mind that Joan Allen is one of the best actresses on the stage and screen of the past 50 years. She is a versatile actress who can play the facets of many type of roles and have you riveted. She does not have to be always breathtakingly beautiful, profoundly intelligent or even independent minded in the sense of a modern woman. Her characters can be flawed and sometimes even a bit hard to completely like. Her character here is many of those aspects, and at times, her voice is difficult to take, not because she is annoying but because of the situation she is in. That makes this film at times difficult to watch, and certainly it's a film that is difficult to completely like. Even the toughest actresses of the golden age of Cinema, Stanwyck, Davis, Lupino, among others, could play characters in situations where their vulnerability is overwhelmed by an intense situation, usually involving a man whose sinister nature threatens their safety.

The excellent Anthony LaPaglia plays the so-called perfect husband, maybe not a perfect man but someone whom she certainly would not suspect of being one of those sinister natured men, who has the secret she discovers when he's away on business. By accident, she discovers a secret hiding place where he keeps the identifications of women he has murdered, and her nightmare becomes real when he ends up scaring her when she discovers him sitting on a chair in their bedroom in the middle of the night. And he knows that she knows his secret.

The sound of Allen's voice becomes all the more painful to listen to accidentally, as I discovered when continuing the movie while still groggy from a nap. This could add to the sinister nature of the film, but it only increased my issues with the film and her character. Something in the writing of the script makes it clear that half of her character was missing from the page, that she's barely alive as a woman, wife, mother and human being, and only going through the motions of living. It's only in the last 25 minutes where she decides on how to deal with him that she wakes up to have any sense of purpose.

Based on a Stephen King story, this had the potential of being really gripping, but those long pauses of silence are as painful as the whiny sound of Allen's fear being revealed. This is a long endless fall into a nightmarish situation that makes you feel like an intruder, and as garishly maudlin it becomes, it never succeeds in being successful in getting you to really feel for her. You begin to wonder if her situation will turn her into a female version of him, collecting the identification of men like her husband and doing the same thing. Not a pleasant way to pass 90 minutes, and an example of a long fall with no landing where the person falling begs for a heart attack so the painless emptiness of that fall will end.

Bob Anderson (Anthony LaPaglia) and his wife Darcy (Joan Allen) have an excellent life with great kids. Meanwhile there is a serial killer on the loose who calls himself "Beadie." He tortures, rapes, and kills women. The plots come together rather fast then you wonder where Steven King is going to go with this...and it is a bit anti-climatic considering his other efforts.

The movie was way too short. After it had established the characters, it seems to have been on a downhill slide as it solves the mystery for us rather early. The film was like sex without foreplay. It went through the motions, but it could have been better.

Thanks for the coin symbolism, but it needed more. It was as if Steven King didn't write the script, but just added his name to it for some coin.

Parental Guide: F-bomb. Sex. No nudity.