It is a very easy thing to do to give a film an unabashedly, unflinchingly, negative review. To take a bad movie and simply reel off the problems with it, and make it out to be the worst piece of schlock ever thrown up on the big screen takes no skill, no effort, and more often than not makes the review untrue. It is far more difficult to take a bad movie, note that it is bad and why, and then to mention something good about it, to find something positive about it.
I have been wracking my brain to come up with a reason to watch The Honeytrap, an independent British film written and directed by Michael G. Gunther in his first time at the helm, and I’m having some difficulty. It lacks wit, it lacks intelligence, it tries so hard to be clever, and yet completely falls flat. It is as though Gunther only ever took one pass writing the script, changed what he wanted the movie to be about a couple of times as he wrote, and yet never went back to make earlier portions of the film work with what he eventually decided he wanted the movie to be. In short, it’s a mess.
The movie’s title refers to a common method of entrapping men and women. The basic concept is to have a third party use an attractive individual to seduce another person so that the third party can manipulate the prey at a later date. It’s also sometimes referred to as a “honeypot” and if one reads espionage literature, it is a relatively common trope used mainly to get a person to reveal secrets to an enemy.
The Honeytrap stars Emily Lloyd as Catherine, a woman who has just arrived in London in order to move in with her fiancé. Catherine is clearly a troubled woman, is taking drugs, and is emotionally disturbed. What her fiancé, Jonathan, played by Anthony Green, sees in her is anyone’s guess, because from the moment she arrives in London (the first scene in the film) she is unlikable. Due to her being virtually friendless, and her depressing, disturbed psychological makeup, Catherine decides that Jonathan’s working late all the time means that he’s cheating on her and decides to hire someone to find out.
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