Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Heatwave’ on Paramount+, a Thriller That’s a Cautionary Tale About Sleeping With the Boss’ Wife

Now on Paramount+, Heatwave is one of those unexceptional low-budget thrillers that make you want to whip out an ol’ chestnut of a cliche and compare it to a Lifetime Original. It’s not worthy of that – more like one of those free Z-grade streaming channels that jams ads smack in the middle of movie scenes with no rhyme or reason. It’s not even funny-bad, it’s just boring-bad. Here’s why.

HEATWAVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “I was showered in love. Then I was forged in fire,” narrates Claire (Kat Graham). Yeah, I know – whoa, heavy. She goes on, about how a slumlord’s neglect resulted in her family’s death, and how she torched his house in retaliation. Now, 11 years later, she turns on the stove and you wonder, hey, is she a pyromaniac? IF ONLY she was that interesting! No, she got into some trouble but is on the other side of it and working as a sub-flunky for a real-estate mogul, Scott Crane (Sebastian Roche). By day, she yearns to be a wheeler and/or dealer in the property game. By night, she sneaks off after hours to the pool on the roof of a fancy condo to take a solo dip, something enabled by a friend who’s the concierge there, and who works all hours, day or night, because the plot demands it. She sometimes hits the dating app, via which she meets Arlo (Cardi Wong), who works as a police detective, the type of person who also might come in handy in this plot.

One night, someone joins her at the pool: Eve (Merritt Patterson), who drops her robe and apparently forgot her bathing suit. Nothing but a smile, as they say. Woo woo. Cue the Sloe Jamz playlist. They begin quite the torrid affair. It’s hot. So is the weather, because the title of the movie is happening, with temps in the triple-digits. Should I mention that fire is also hot – fire, which Claire always looks at like she’s in love with it and scared by it at the same time? SO MUCH HAWTNESS. At work, Claire drops a real estate tip – is it a HOT tip? Damn right – and nudges past douchewad Lane (Aren Buchholz) to become Scott’s assistant. I think that means she’s still just fetching coffee. What was she doing prior that fetching coffee for the boss is a step up? She was too nicely dressed to be emptying the bins. Data entry maybe?

Anyway. It’s so extra-warm blackouts are making the city extra-sexy. Claire and Eve snuggle post-sexytimes while surrounded by about six, seven dozen candles and all the flames are like symbolistical or metaphorics or something. Claire has lunch with Scott and we lean in, trying to figure out if this guy’s a creep or not. Most mega-rich real estate developers in movies are, but we don’t ever want to assume. He opens up to her a little bit about his troubled marriage and she says she spent some time in a halfway house and that halfway house was established by his first wife and then she learns that his first wife “went missing” and his current wife is pause for dramatic effect Eve! Oh boy. But she just can’t pry herself away from Eve, and Claire is now playing a most dangerous game, a game involving treachery and deceit and infidelity and money and kickboxing (!) and muuuuuurrrrrderrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Heatwave is the chintzy, generic thriller I imagined Prognosis Negative might be.

Performance Worth Watching: Kat Graham is just fine here, but only just fine, considering the material, which I theorize was written by automated screenplay software.

Memorable Dialogue: Scott drops a real howler: “They say that love is deadlier than fire – twice the heat, 10 times the destruction.”

Sex and Skin: This movie has plenty of opportunities to become an erotic thriller, but all that sweat and flame translates to very little lust: A head beneath a sheet, some face-smashing, cute bikinis, no nudity.

Our Take: Heatwave features the least-convincing bank statement in movie history. Yes, I paused on it. Funniest thing I’ve read in months. A real point of pride for the props department here. First, it misspells “withdrawal” as “withdrawl.” And then, one of those is an ATM “withdrawl” of $47,900.00. Most banks limit the amount of cash you can withdraw from an ATM, but not this one! Can a single ATM even have that much cash inside? Maybe that particular ATM was stocked with $10,000 bills. Maybe this movie thinks you aren’t paying attention – and you’re probably not. At that point in the movie, two-thirds in, you’re probably bored and thumbing through back issues of Birds and Blooms or picking the nits from your pet capuchin.

My point: That bank statement tells us that Heatwave doesn’t give a shit. It doesn’t give a shit about details, it doesn’t give a shit about characters, it doesn’t give a shit if it’s derivative, it doesn’t give a shit that the screenplay hinges on no less than five coincidences, it doesn’t give a shit that it’s predictable, it doesn’t give a shit that it’s stacked to the ceiling with cliches, it doesn’t give a shit that it’s lazier than Garfield the cat on Labor Day, it doesn’t give a shit that it explains the plot in the dialogue because it thinks you’re too stupid to comprehend it, and it probably doesn’t give a shit if you’re laughing at it. In return, you should not give a shit about it.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Again: “withdrawl.” You didn’t think anyone would notice. I noticed.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.