A macabre mystery thriller that delivers exactly what the title promises questions its moral compass on streaming

It can often be a benefit for a movie to let you know straight away what the story entails, and rarely has that been truer than in the case of 2008’s mystery thriller Tortured.

Funnily enough, the entire narrative is in fact predicated on somebody being tortured, although it isn’t quite as straightforward as that. The formulaic pot-boiler stars Yellowstone alum and VOD veteran Cole Hauser as an undercover FBI agent working for a mobster, who ends up getting his hands dirtier than he’d initially planned.

Laurence Fishburne’s accountant is the title character – as unsavory as it sounds – with the unassuming businessman captured and then subjected to a harrowing ordeal in order to extricate the necessary information the shady underworld organization requires. It’s A-to-B stuff that doesn’t boast much in the way originality, something a decidedly tepid Rotten Tomatoes audience approval rating of only 47 percent makes abundantly clear.

Being the gluttons for punishment that they are, though, streaming subscribers have opted to torture themselves with Tortured, a full 15 years after hit first hit the home video circuit and promptly vanished without a trace. Per FlixPatrol, writer and director Nolan Lebovitz’s gnarly noir has been interrogating the Paramount Plus most-watched charts over the weekend, but the real question is whether or not the at-home audiences who took the plunge ended up satisfied with what they got.

There are a smattering of decent performances and some suitably atmospheric production design, but beyond that it’s about as by-the-numbers as its moniker would suggest.