Kelly Reyes is a minor star on the women's beach volleyball circuit. She's
devoted all of her waking hours to volleyball, and she possesses the talent to
be a tournament winner, but a more experienced team dominates every
championship and stands in Kelly's way. Just as Kelly is wondering if she
should abandon her dreams of glory, two major developments thrust her into the
limelight. First, one of the girls on the more experienced team dies in an
accident, and Kelly is the chosen replacement. Second, a major sports reporter
decides to write about the new team, and he wants to focus his story on Kelly
rather than her storied partner.
There are a few bumps on her road to glory. After she and the reporter take
their relationship to a deeper level, the police show up on the beach the next
morning to question her. The police think that the death of the other
volleyball star might have been a homicide, and the only one who seems to have
benefited from the death is Kelly. As they check out her alibis and
explanations, they are flabbergasted by her claims to have spent time with a
reporter who disappeared some time earlier, and is presumed dead.
Impact Point is a by-the-numbers stalker film which was made for the video
market. In order to maintain some dramatic tension, the story relies almost
exclusively on plot twists involving the identity of the man who claims to be
the missing reporter. In the hands of a slick director working with a deft
script, that might have made a nice little grade-B mystery, but most of the
plot twists are spoiled by heavy-handedness. It might have been different. For
example, if the script had cut out the sequence in which the reporter
interviews, then seduces Kelly, the film would have taken on many additional
layers of mystery. In that case, we in the audience would wonder if Kelly
herself had killed the other volleyball player, and we would wonder along with
the detectives whether she had completely fabricated the supposed interview
without knowing that the reporter was missing. None of that tension was allowed to
develop. Since we see Kelly being interviewed and seduced by the man who is
using the reporter's name, it is immediately apparent that the imposter must
have known that the real reporter was dead. Since that is a secret known only
to the police, the imposter must therefore have killed the reporter and
assumed his identity in order to get close to Kelly. Knowing that, we also
have to assume that the imposter also killed the other volleyball player
because of his obsession with Kelly.
The completely obvious nature of the mystery doesn't doom the film to
complete failure. There are still matters to resolve - who the imposter really
is, how he can track Kelly's every move, and whether he can get to Kelly at
the specific time and place he has chosen to murder her (the major volleyball
championship). Of course, there's also the matter of whether Kelly can pull
herself together enough to win the big match knowing that there is a killer
somewhere on the premises.
If all that sounds sort of tired, well, that's because it is. It's a
hackneyed sports movie nested inside a predictable stalker film. I would not
call it a poor film, but rather just a workmanlike, ordinary effort. The
director did get some pretty good mileage out of a $2 million budget, and she
elicited some pretty good performances out of a C-list cast, so it's not the
kind of film that will make you seek out gypsies to place a curse on everyone
involved in its creation. It's the kind that may be barely interesting enough
to get you to stick it out without the fast forward button on DVD, or without changing
the channel if you catch it on cable, but will later provoke some introspection when you
wonder why exactly you did that.
