Review: 'No Good Deed' Starring Idris Elba and Taraji P. Henson

At some point earlier this week Screen Gems, the low-budget genre arm of Sony Pictures, sent out an email saying that press screenings for their upcoming home invasion thriller "No Good Deed" had been shuttered because the twist ending was so seismic that they didn't want members of the press seeing it early and then spilling the beans. (There had been a handful of screenings in anticipation of junket interviews; presumably these same journalists were not reviewing.) According to this official statement, the studio wasn't hiding the movie because it was lousy, they were concealing it in an effort to preserve its shock value. Of course, this was utter hogwash. Not only did the "twist" they had been endlessly hyping come across as a limp afterthought, but also the movie itself is a gruelingly unpleasant slog. "No Good Deed" deserves to be punished.

At the beginning of "No Good Deed," Colin Evans (Idris Elba) is pleading for an early release...