Derailed [HD DVD] [2006] [US Import]

Charles Schine (Clive Owen) is having a rough time lately. Charles and his wife Deanna (Melissa George) are stressed in their marriage. Both have been working constantly to save extra cash for their ailing daughter who has Type 1 Diabetes requiring her to have a home dialysis machine and undergo other expensive treatments. One confusing morning, after leaving home Charles forgets to take enough money to pay for his train fare.

Lucky though, there is the generous and sexy yuppyish Financial Advisor Lucinda Harris (Jennifer Anniston) to buy a ticket for him. Soon they develop a train riding relationship, and benign pleasantries turn into having lunch, which turns into drinks after work. The accelerated flirtation eventually culminates in attempted infidelity. Soon they find themselves making out and going to a seedy hotel for a secret romp.

Their tryst is thwarted when a French-accented thug breaks into their room and enacts, with theatrical relish, the worst nightmare of guilt-ridden, well-heeled adulterers. Blaming the whole thing on getting mugged Charles tries to put it behind him when he gets a call at home from his attacker, Philippe Laroche (Vincent Cassel), who begins a game of blackmail needing $20,000 or things will be taken further.

Directed by Mikael Hafström from a vaguely familiar screenplay by Stuart Beattie, the film ushers in every twist and turn with a kind of unsubtle foreboding, but that's half the fun of the movie. The shocks and plot twists come with a shocking intensity with Hafström accomplishing the difficult task of making Owen seem ineffectual and lumpish and Anniston sharp and grim, he's also made Vincent Cassel's slick, versatile, multilingual arch-villain LaRoche improbably florid and cartoonish.

Rather than nail its characters to the bed they've made, Derailed spins off into reprehensible mastermind territory, all the while slogging through a predictable rehash of the cinematic dangers of cheating on your wife - especially if you happen to be an upper-middle-class executive, your wife a gorgeous blond schoolteacher and your daughter a vulnerable, sickly waif whose fourth kidney transplant you've scrimped and saved for.

Yet the film is always compelling, and imminently watchable and it's interesting seeing Owen and Anniston together; they have the type of relationship that achieves a pulpy, darkly driven passionate intensity that commands an equally hammering denouement for them both. Mike Leonard March 06.