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In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Overcomplicated screenplay trying to show off with too many TV twists... so as to cover up the poor quality of character writing. Spader is lost and tries to find confort by looking into his box of tricks but they don't fit since the story is going south. The only one playing right is Aidan Quinn. This isn't really a movie but a second hand TV serial quality something.

"Shadow of Fear" has some pretty good production values for a low budget direct to DVD movie. It also has some decent acting by the various participants on the screen. Unfortunately, it's hard to build any enthusiasm for the rest of the movie. The story elements and the characters are often so murky that it's hard to understand what is going on at times. It's like starting a novel at chapter 3, since a lot of the elements in the movie movie go are never explained at all. Some elements are (eventually) explained, but much of the movie remains confusing. What went wrong here? Since I find it hard to believe that production would go ahead on an incoherent screenplay, I suspect that the original cut of the movie ran a lot longer, and when the movie was subsequently cut down to run at a more reasonable length, a lot of explanation was removed. It's too bad, because there are signs that the original cut would have been engaging despite its length. You'd be better off waiting for a director's cut instead of watching the movie as it is right now.

Let me ask you a question. If you had James Spader, Aidan Quinn and Peter Coyote in your cast, would you make Matt Davis the star of your film? How is that supposed to work? How is a young actor virtually no one has ever heard of like Davis supposed to avoid getting blown off the screen every time he's in a scene with one of those veteran performers? It's like trying to build a house where three sides are made of brick and one side is made of straw. You can't blame Davis for that. He didn't give himself the part. These filmmakers had the money/connections/Columbian nose candy to get Spader, Quinn and Coyote in their motion picture, but then the best they could get for the most important role in the whole shebang is Matt Davis? What, was Urkel from "Family Matters" unavailable? How about Screech from "Saved by the Bell"? Did Adrian Zmed not return any phone calls? Shadow Of Fear certainly has other problems, but this thing never had a chance to be any good due to such an inexplicable imbalance in experience and star power.Harrison French (Matt Davis) is a young businessman who just lost a big deal. Driving home in the rain he hits and kills a guy, whom he drags into the woods and tries to forget about. Two fairly unbelievable coincidences prevent that from happening. One, it turns out the guy Harrison killed robbed a bank that very morning. Two, it seems the guy was also the brother of Harrison's erratic wife (Robin Tunney). Desperate for help, Harrison turns to the enigmatic William Ashbury (James Spader), who promises to help Harrison avoid the dogged pursuit of Detective Scofield (Aidan Quinn). But it turns out Ashbury has some very unusual ideas of what constitutes "help". Throw in the disapproving father of Harrison's wife (Peter Coyote) and a sister-in-law (Lacey Chabert) who wants to jump Harrison's bones, and that's Shadow Of Fear.I can't say Matt Davis does an awful job in this movie because Harrison French is such a worthless character that all but the best would be hamstrung in their performance. Harrison has no discernible personality and before the audience sees enough of him to ever know that, he's introduced first as a loser in his career and then as the sort of bastard who will negligently murder somebody and cover it up to protect himself. And he's the HERO of this affair.The only interesting thing about Shadow Of Fear is William Ashbury, both because Spader is always interesting and because the character is like the Star Trek Mirror Universe version of the hero of a Stephen J. Cannell TV show, if that makes any sense. Ashbury assists rich and powerful men in covering up their misdeeds, then punishes them by making their repeat their sins over and over until they're sick of them. Oh, and he also appears to hit on their wives and young daughters. Why he does it all and to what end is never explained or even hinted at, but there's something intriguing about a character who could very easily be a good guy instead made out to be a villain. It's also amusing to see how incredulous Ashbury is at the end to be taken down by such a nonentity as Harrison, largely because it comes off equally as Spader's incredulousness at how his talent has gone to waste in this turkey.If Robin Tunney and Lacey Chabert had gotten naked and Davis had been replaced by someone capable of standing up to his older co-stars, Shadow Of Fear might have made an implausible but tolerable pot boiler. As it is, it's like a ship that sinks 30 seconds after its been launched from the docks.

I'm surprised this movie has got such a high rating. It starts out very promising with some nice images in the rain. In fact, it is extremely fascinating about until the time when he gets back to his wife and they begin talking. After that the movie falls apart little by little, until it becomes so borderline non-sensible that I just had to turn it off. It is not a matter of "plot twists" as some viewer suggested. Obviously, it is a question of just not being able to put a decent plot together. I see an alarming trend in the new DVD-market where many movies are put out quicker and easier to DVD than it was possible in the good old video days. American horror has suffered in recent years, and did not improve with the pathetic remakes of brilliant Asian horror. Anyway, "Shadow of Fear" is not a horror-movie. It is hardly even a movie. If it had only lasted until he got back to his wife, and she then turned into a demon or something; then it would have been a good "Twilight Zone"-episode but when a movie-plot collapses like that in one superfluous scene after the other then it becomes irrelevant to watch. As one viewer suggested, we are never told what this "organisation" does. I think, this is a major problem. On the back of the DVD it said something about a secret "cult"-organisation with big power. It sounded promising but in the movie this organisation seems completely devoid of power, so what's the point?