‘Strictly Confidential’ Review: Makeout Scenes and Flimsy Melodrama on a Caribbean Isle

variety.com:

Dennis Harvey Film Critic “Some secrets are meant to stay buried” says the ad line for “Strictly Confidential.” But you’d need a sizable underground bunker to contain all the effortfully shocking revelations sprung in this very silly sudser, which starts out looking like an erotic thriller-mystery, then descends into a series of flashback-laden explication monologues more apt for “Dynasty” than Agatha Christie.

Damian Hurley’s directorial feature, with famous mum Elizabeth top-billed and producing, provides several hardbodied younger performers opportunity to model clothes and approximate recognizable human emotions on the coastline of tax haven island nation Saint Kitts and Nevis.

But what was likely an enjoyable working Caribbean vacation for cast and crew proves somewhat labored for viewers. Nonetheless, watched in the right spirit, with appropriate libations, it could prove quite entertaining … if not in the way presumably intended.

Lionsgate is releasing to U.S. theaters, digital and on-demand platforms on April 5. A note of fashion/travel advertisement is struck immediately with images of bikinied thespians floating in clear blue waters, writhing in the arms of muscular shirtless men, and so forth — an opening montage not elevated when it turns out to be dreamt by someone bathing in the requisite luxury bathtub surrounded by (doubtless scented) candles.