Poison Rose is a 2019 film about a Galveston, Texas football player who is murdered and the private detective trying to prove his daughter, the player’s wife, is innocent.
6 out of 10 stars. This is very watchable with a lot of famous actors, but you’re going to have a hard time recognizing them. Ella Bleu Travolta plays the player’s wife and her dad John Travolta plays the private detective. Brendan Fraser plays the creepy doctor and head of the sanitarium and Famke Janssen plays the PI’s old love and the real murderer. Morgan Freeman plays the head of the local gambling club. Robert Patrick plays the Sheriff.
Carson Phillips is a drinker, smoker, gambler, and a Los Angeles private detective. He’s currently being sought after by bookies for not paying his debt when a beautiful woman shows up in his office and hires him to find her aunt, Barbara Van Poole. Barbara is supposed to be a patient at the Pleasant Meadows sanitarium in Galveston, Texas, but they won’t let the woman see her aunt at all and now she’s very suspicious that something has happened to her.
So Carson takes the job and goes to Galveston where he used to be the star football quarterback. He visits his old friend Doc who runs the local gambling club and pretty much everything else in Galveston now. Carson used to have a girl in Galveston, Jayne, who married a rich oil baron named Charlie Hunt who left her a widow with a beautiful daughter Becky. He also left her very rich and with a terrible legacy–their oil poisoned all the water around Galveston and it was a beach town. So a lot of people hate Jayne.
When Carson goes to the sanitarium he’s not allowed to see Barbara Van Poole. Instead Dr. Miles Mitchell comes to speak with him and explains that Barbara is busy and will be busy all day. Miles used to be in high school with Carson and sort of idolizes him. So Carson tells him to call him when Barbara is available. The following day Carson comes back and has a talk with Miles. Miles turns him away a second time, so Carson breaks into the facility and sees an entire wing empty and filthy as though it hasn’t been used or cleaned in years. He breaks into Miles’ office and takes photo of Barbara’s file which is empty except for a billing statement. He does find bets that Miles has made on the next football game, for their team to lose.
Carson goes to the football game the following day, curious why Miles would bet against their own team. He sees Happy, the star football quarterback, collapse and be taken from the field with foam coming out of his mouth. Happy is Becky’s abusive husband and Happy cheated on her regularly with about every woman in town, so when he dies Becky becomes the chief suspect.
Jayne calls Carson and has him come visit. She hires him to protect Becky and prove she didn’t murder Happy. Meanwhile Jayne makes a deal with Doc for him to take 49% of her oil business in exchange for him clearing Becky’s name. And Doc tells Carson a mother would do anything to protect her daughter.
Eventually Carson discovers that Miles is running a meth business out of the sanitarium and most of his patients are dead and buried on the grounds. :0 He gave Happy the meth that everyone thinks killed him. He gets into a shoot out with Carson and eventually one of his patients shoots him. But afterward Carson sees Jayne and she admits she killed Happy with laced drugs. She’s dying from cancer, the same cancer that killed most of the town from the poisoned groundwater created by their oil business. Poetic justice. She tells Carson that Becky is his daughter and that’s where the story ends.
6 out of 10 stars. The ending felt very rushed and the scene where Miles is killed by his patient was really shocking and unbelievable. Travolta’s daughter is like a younger version of Liv Tyler with startling blue eyes. Don’t expect the actors to look the same as when they were young. They didn’t age well.
When Famke Janssen appeared in the 1995 film GoldenEye, she was considered the most beautiful in the world. Teenage girls starved themselves and dyed their hair to look like her in this unrealistic ideal of beauty.
Twenty-four years later, it’s clear that Famke Janssen has had some serious botox, plastic surgery, and silicone filler. She looks like a burn victim and sadly is wearing a wig as well. Why is it so wrong to show your age??? I have no doubt that she would look naturally beautiful had she chosen to age gracefully and naturally.
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