'Willed to Kill', is a suspenseful thriller, that is well acted, & scripted for a TV movie of the week. This movie was engaging, & thanks to the previous reviewer *alannasser*, I did not figure out who the killer was, until the last 15 minutes. This movie follows Detective Karyn Mitchell, & her pursuit of killers. My one main problem regarding this movie is the main character Karyn has shot 3 serial killers, on her own. This is a bit improbable, but I went with it. I was able to suspend my disbelief about this, because Karyn is well played by Sarah Jane Morris, & so I am able to forgive this improbable bit of scripting.Karyn is a savvy detective, who chooses to do things on her own, probably stemming from the fact that when she was a teenager, she discovered her father was a serial killer. She eventually turned him in, he went to prison, and was executed. But Karyn never forgave herself, because during her delay in reporting her father, he killed 3 more innocent people.Now her past motivates her to become the best cop she can be, sometimes even sacrificing her own happiness, so that she can try to protect the innocent from the evil in the world. Karyn arrives at her latest murder investigation, and it has the calling card of the infamous Hades serial killer from the '90's, who was never caught. Along with her partner, Detective Gavin McNabb, they try to determine if this is the same killer from the past, or just a copycat.The killer seems to take a special interest in Karyn. He begins calling her, & seems to have access to privileged information, that he has no business knowing. The killer is also sending letters to the local investigative reporter, who also seems to have private knowledge about Karyn. Everywhere Karyn looks, she is surrounded by suspects...Is it her partner-slash-ex-fiancé, whom she broke up with a year ago? He didn't take the ending of their relationship well, and now feels trapped by another woman he impregnated & feels forced to marry.Is the Hades killer Dr. Aaron Kade, Karyn's psychiatrist? After she was forced to shoot & kill the last murderer she was after, the department required her to seek professional help. The doctor does seem a bit too inquisitive for her taste, & often says inappropriate things, like comparing her to the serial killers she hunts.Is it Floyd, the investigative reporter, who always seems to be one step ahead of the police, and shows up at crime scenes before any of the other press? After all, the killer is sending Floyd letters with information that only the killer would know, or is he? Is it Lieutenant Schneider, who seems to care about Karyn with fatherly concern, but who also removes her from the case, just when she's getting close? Or is it her new boyfriend, Mark Hanson, who she just conveniently met outside of her gym, even though she's never seen him there before? Mark also installed electronics for 2 of the victims, was captured in a photograph of the crowd outside one of the crime scenes, and shares several of the traits with the Hades Killer. Could it be him?This movie has good acting, decent writing, nice pacing, and great reveals. It is a SOLID thriller. Even though lots of the plot points are cliché, the acting more than makes up for this. I also wasn't expecting Oscar winning acting/writing from a Lifetime movie of the week. Please, people, stop expecting Oscar/Emmy performances, and you will enjoy these movies so much more.

Hmm. Don't know about 'Willed to Kill' but watching this may make you lose your will to live. It's the typical serial killer fare but somehow accomplishes the feat of being formulaic and implausible at the same time. Quite an achievement. First of all, it's full of totally lame (and I mean seriously limping) jokes and what the scriptwriters obviously believe is entertaining banter, which is entirely unamusing.The lead character (a female detective) jumps from one wrong conclusion to another, going off gung ho and half-cocked whenever she has a lead, never telling anyone where she's going and quite often endangering herself and others in the process before finally, approximately two hours after the rest of us, working out who is really responsible.The protagonist's stupidity is only surpassed by that of her colleagues who are continually pursuing even less likely suspects than she is. As a consequence, you soon lose interest in who did what or why. I think we're supposed to care about a possible romance between the two leads but as it is, they're so badly written, it's hard to give a damn.Just seen that this movie was actually nominated for an award: Best Writing in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series. Now that really is a mystery.

It should be said from the start that this is a notch above the typical Lifetime movie. The lead actress is far better than most, and the story is above average. The film employs a familiar trope: the detective is contacted by the murderer during the course of her investigation. The murderer uses a voice distorter and speaks regularly with the detective by telephone. The bad guy is filmed in such a way as not to reveal his identity: from behind, in a shadow, from non-revealing angles. You've seen this many times before. Sometimes the viewer is allowed a bare glimpse of the murderer's chin or nose, but not enough to enable you to recognize the character. - Well, that's how it's supposed to work. But incredibly, the murderer is filmed in several shots so that his identity is clear. The filmmaker shows too much. This is clearly unintentional - you're not supposed to know which character, who, as in all these movies, turns out to be a character you're already familiar with but are not supposed to suspect, will turn out to be the culprit. But you do know, well before the final reveal, if you've been watching with only casual attention. This strikes me as a huge blunder. If you want to be kept in suspense, don't look at the murderer in the scenes in which he is on the telephone with the detective. If you do look, you'll recognize him.

This morning I watched a quite good thriller I'd recorded from Lifetime over the weekend: "Willed to Kill," a 2012 production from Incendo Media that featured Sarah Jane Morris (hot!) as Boston homicide detective Karyn Mitchell (the pretentious spelling of the first name — what's wrong with "Karen"? — bothers me a little), who's already blown away two previous serial killers when, in one of the most chilling opening sequences ever put on film, she enters a house where a knife-wielding psycho has tied up and gagged a real woman, set her at a dining table with a bunch of mannequins, and is preparing to torture and kill her. When Karyn crashes the scene, the baddie starts teasing her, asking who she would want to play her in the movie they're going to make of his life (for his own account, he's so closely channeling "The Silence of the Lambs" his choice to play himself would obviously be Anthony Hopkins!), then goes after her with his knife and she shoots him in self-defense. For this, she's christened "Dirty Harriet" by her colleagues on the Boston PD (of course, this being a Lifetime movie, Montreal is "playing" Boston), and the fruits of her labors are an internal-affairs investigation, a dressing-down by her chief, Lt. Schneider (David McIlwraith), a sour attitude from her partner and former fiancé, Gavin McNaab (Ross McCall), and mandatory therapy sessions with Dr. Aaron Kade (Michael Riley).Then a couple of murders occur in which the victims are scarred post-mortem with the Greek letter that symbolizes Hades, trademark of the so-called "Hades Killer" who operated 15 years earlier. Karyn is convinced the new killings are the work of a copycat, and she has to deal with a succession of weirdos falsely confessing to the crimes as well as the watchful eyes of her fellow cops, who want her to catch Hades, all right, but to catch him alive this time and allow the judicial system to take its course instead of summarily executing him. Director Philippe Gagnon and writer James Taylor Phillips give us a surprisingly broad suspect pool namely by making just about every male in Karyn's vicinity so unbearably twitchy we're sure one of them must be the killer. Among the suspects she encounters are Arthur Brady (Kent McQuaid) — whose recently deceased uncle was one of the suspects in the original Hades murders — along with another wanna-be who actually kills someone in his efforts to convince the cops he is Hades, but whose crime has just the opposite effect when Karyn points out that he was considerably sloppier than the real Hades (or at least the new one — you know a thriller plot is convoluted when one of the crimes is committed by a copycat of the copycat!)."Willed to Kill"'s plot takes an interesting turn when Gavin invites Karyn to his upcoming wedding — "You're not supposed to marry the rebound!" she insists, though he says he got her pregnant and therefore had to — and Karyn has a meet-cute outside a gym with Mark Hanson (Dylan Bruce, a considerably hunkier good guy than we usually get in a Lifetime movie) and they have sex on the first date and "get serious" thereafter — at least until Karyn decides, on the basis of his inside information and his similar background to the killer (notably the fact that they both lost their wives — Karyn knows this because the killer has been in regular phone contact with her, slipping her bits of background and always hanging up just in time to make sure the police can't complete the trace on his calls), that he's Hades and arrests him. The film cycles through various false suspects and red herrings — including the one I thought was going to be the guilty party, a twitchy reporter who was following her and stalking her to get stories about the case, until he was killed in the next-to-last act — and finally reveals that Hades was (spoiler alert!) Karyn's therapist, Dr. Kade, and that Karyn's father was the original Hades. Karyn's father was never charged with those crimes but was bad enough he was caught and executed anyway, and Karyn actually turned him in when she was 16 — but she agonized about doing that for six months, during which Hades I murdered Dr. Kade's parents, and rather than just kill her Dr. Kade decided to become Hades II, picking his victims from the ranks of career criminals so he wouldn't knock off someone who could be considered an "innocent victim," and comparing himself to Karyn as someone who also killed criminals instead of trusting the legal process.The story is far-fetched and stretches the bounds of legitimate suspension of disbelief, but within that it at least makes sense, the resolution is (more or less) logical and the overall effect is quite chilling and offers everything you want from a suspense film. Director Gagnon stages the action expertly, up to and including the final confrontation (Dr. Kade is planning to take Karyn to the roof of the police building, push her off and then report to his superiors that in their last session she threatened suicide, so they'll believe him when he says she killed herself), which Karyn extricates herself from in a believable manner while it's Dr. Kade who falls off the building and dies. (That was a pity; I was hoping the final frames would be her turning him over to Lt. Schneider and saying, "See? I CAN take someone alive!")