Metacritic Film

Shock to the System

Starring Chad Allen, Sebastian Spence, Morgan Fairchild, Michael Woods, and Nelson Wong

MPAA RATING: R for some sexual content, nudity, language and a violent image

Regent Entertainment
Crime  |  Foreign
91 minutes | Color
Canada
Released In Theaters August 4, 2006

When hard boiled private eye Donald Strachey (Allen) finds his latest client dead, an apparent suicide, Albany's favorite gay detective smells a rat and decides to take matters into his own hands. (Regent Entertainment)

WRITTEN BY
Ron McGee

DIRECTED BY
Ron Oliver

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

54 / 100

Critic Reviews

70 Variety
Enough action, a tiny pinch of sex and some campy moments from Morgan Fairchild.
63 TV Guide
The story delivers enough twists and turns to be engaging without feeling like work, and the overall vibe is dangerous and flirty rather than brutal or excessively graphic.
60 The New York Times Nathan Lee
A sly, refreshingly grown-up gay entertainment, though rather less satisfying as a thriller.
50 Village Voice Jim Ridley
Director Ron Oliver applies a thin veneer of straight-to-cable pseudo-gloss without finding a workable tone, and the cast lacks the charisma and chemistry to make the genre and gender-bending register as more than novelty.
50 Los Angeles Times Michael Ordoña
So grimly determined to be even-handed that it never generates tension.
40 The Hollywood Reporter
Shock to the System demonstrates that merely subverting genre conventions doesn't quite make for compelling entertainment.

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