Above Suspicion’: Emilia Clarke Plays A Southern Femme Fatale in Much-Delayed Thriller

Emilia Clarke, aka Khaleesi from “Game of Thrones,” leads the much-delayed thriller “Above Suspicion” into oblivion. Sporting a distracting Southern accent, Clarke plays a woman in Kentucky who becomes involved with an FBI agent.

The film, based on Joe Sharkey’s 1993 non-fiction book of the same name, was seen by yours truly more than a year ago after I was kindly sent a screener by one of the film’s producers. I didn’t take notes, I didn’t plan on reviewing, it was just out of sheer curiosity that I decided to watch it.

After all, “Above Suspicion” is directed by Phillip Noyce. The 70-year-old Aussie filmmaker had a solid one-two punch in 2002 with “The Quiet American,” and “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” his two most personal and accomplished films to date, but has been mostly a hired hand in the industry, directing good-to-decent studio fare (“Salt,” “Patriot Games,” Catch A Fire” “Dead Calm”), and none-too-impressive hack jobs (“The Bone Collector” “The Giver,” “The Saint” “Sliver”). 

More intriguingly, which says a lot about the movie’s quality, production on “Above Suspicion” was completed in 2017. What’s with the four-year delay? Supposedly, Roadside had wanted to distribute “Above Suspicion” since it was finished, but a long holdup resulted over a party that wanted to invest $8 million for p&a. Negotiations dragged on and on … and here we are, four years later and it’s set to be dumped on VOD this Friday.

As I said, I didn’t bother reviewing the film a year ago and I probably won’t bother now. If it was any good then I would have taken a crack at it, or seen it again, but there really is no point now. The film has practically lost all relevance and, quite frankly, it isn’t very good. What we have here is a down-and-dirty B-movie, which could have gone either way, but ends up being the kind of straight-to-digital release that will probably not get much attention when it is released tomorrow.