Blu-ray Review: N-Secure

David Alan Washington (Cordell Moore) has it all: money, power, and a beautiful young fiancée (Essence Atkins) with whom he is ready to start a new life with. Sadly, though, Davis is also a big control freak — and his overwhelming ability to manage and manipulate every aspect of the life of his bride-to-be comes crashing to a halt one afternoon when he catches her with another fellow (Lamman Rucker). Oh, well. Time to move on, right? Well, that’s exactly what David does. And guess what? He starts the whole domineering cycle all over again; only this time he’s added an extra serving of nuts to his order with his new girlfriend (Denise Boutte).

Murder, manipulation, mayhem. The urban thriller N-Secure promises it all. Now, if only our deadly antagonist had been controlling enough to command the producers of this pile of shit hire a half-decent writer and direct partially-believable performances out of the cast, it could have delivered. Instead, N-Secure is an embarrassingly-awful laugh-fest that features one of the most derivative screenplays in existence (e.g. a character shows up solely to provide us with some back-story before disappearing for good) — not to mention some of the worst performances this side of a homemade Brazilian porn film. And I say that with all due respect to homemade Brazilian porn films.

As I sat there watching N-Secure, feeling as if I were being punished for something I surely must have done in a past life (look, I’m sorry for whatever it was!), I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that this movie picked up an old unproduced script from the Lifetime Network’s direct-to-video division circa 1990 and shot the story — verbatim — for the modern urban theatrical market. As a result, the whole mess of a movie has this odd “it just doesn’t quite fit” quality about it. And then they had to go and title the damn film N-Secure on top of it all. It’s Insecure, dammit: the way you have it now suggests an indefinite-yet-well-protected whole number, or a really reliable source of nitrogen!

Amazingly enough, N-Secure enjoyed a fairly modest opening weekend when it was first released to theaters in October of 2010 (complete with some utterly lurid artwork that even a ‘70s drive-in theater manager would be ashamed of). This was probably not attributable to its being good (it isn’t: maybe people flocked in to see it just so they could get a laugh), but because it was competing against titles like Waiting For Superman and Nowhere Boy on the arthouse scene. Strong competition indeed: who wants to watch a John Lennon biopic or a documentary about the dire situation our schools are in when they can watch a group of rejects from Tyler Perry movies and really bad urban TV shows (The Cosby Show’s Tempestt Bledsoe also turns in an awful performance) humiliate themselves once more?

Awful. But at least it’s good for a laugh or two.

Fox Home Entertainment brings N-Secure to Blu-ray on a 25GB disc with a 1080p/AVC High Def transfer. For the most part, the 2.35:1 widescreen image here is pretty good: solid black levels, vivid colors, strong contrast, etc. The 5.1 DTS-HD English soundtrack does a nice job for what little this movie has to offer in a surround-sound sense (or any other sense, for that matter). Optional English (SDH), Spanish and French subtitles are included.

Fox wisely avoided shelling out for any extras with their Blu-ray release of N-Secure. The nearly-barebones release houses a single 22-minute promotional show, “Inside N-Secure” from The Steve Harvey Morning Show (which originally aired on Cable) that has all the charm and wit of a late-night infomercial (be sure to take a drink every time the host says “Now, can you set this clip up for us?”) and is presented here in Standard Definition and in Full Frame format.

In short: viewers should avoid this movie like the plague. It’s not even secure enough to be insecure, after all.