It was an accident.
Well, it was.
On his first day on the job, officer Will Shelley entered the Chetlo residence on suspicion of a robbery, gun drawn. Mrs. Chetlo had been chopping some vegetables when a few fell on the floor. She retrieved them, kneeling behind the counter as she did so, and then popped back up—knife still in hand—just as Will entered the room.
Will fired.
But that’s not what killed her.
Furious with Will for firing at her (even though he missed) and doubly angry that Will mixed up the police codes for a robbery with a nonviolent crime, Mrs. Chetlo began hitting him. She tossed him around her kitchen for a bit—all while Will determinedly kept his hands in the air, crying out that he didn’t want to hurt her—and then hopped on his back.
“Go to sleep,” were Mrs. Chetlo’s final words. She managed to choke Will out. But as he fell to the ground, Mrs. Chetlo went with him, smashing her head through a wooden table in the process.
When Will came to, it was too late. Mrs. Chetlo was dead.
So you see, it was an accident.
But just as Will’s partner, Terry Brogan, is about to call it in, Terry discovers a basket full of cash: $1 million, to be exact.
Well, that’s pretty suspicious. And Terry figures that Mr. Chetlo—the richest man in Providence, South Carolina—must be up to something to have that kind of cash lying around.
So, rather than call it in, Terry proposes they stage the scene as a robbery gone wrong. Make it look like someone killed Mrs. Chetlo and made off with the money. And then, once everything blows over, split the dough 50-50.
Will doesn’t see another way out. He may be a cop, but his dad went to prison for robbing a bank. And Will did fire a bullet at Mrs. Chetlo, so there’s no way anyone will believe what happened was just an accident. Plus, he has a baby on the way. And he doesn’t want his son to grow up the same way he did, with a father in prison.
Unfortunately, everything that transpires from that moment on is no accident. And what follows goes to show what can happen when people get greedy.
When Will’s dad went to prison, Will, his mom and his sisters were in a bad place. They’d been left with his dad’s debt and no way to repay it. However, rather than let this lead him down a dark path, Will took a different tack. He became a cop, vowing to protect people—especially the ones he loves—rather than harm them, as his father did.
Folks respect Capt. Murphy—Will and Terry’s boss—because even through the loss of her young son, she’s been a good police captain. She isn’t able to save everyone, but because of her due diligence, a guilty party is prevented from taking more lives.
Will picks up after someone who litters. An orphaned child is adopted.
A woman talks out loud to her son, who passed away several years before. (She doesn’t see him or anything, it’s just a cathartic process for her.) She tells him that she had a disturbing dream and believes it may be a harbinger of death. Later in the film, she tells her newly adopted son that her dream was, in fact, a warning. But she also believes that everything bad that occurred thereafter was within God’s providence. “I have to believe that,” she says, because those terrible events are what brought her new son to her.
A woman tells her husband that they are good people and that good things happen to good people (though we know this contrasts with many biblical passages). Another man asks his girlfriend if it’s wrong to want to live the life he wants (which includes illegal activities and marital infidelity) guilt free.
Someone tells a crass, sexual joke about a nun. We hear someone’s wife was a witch. A couple of characters say they believe in Christ but then plot illegal activities for personal gain (and at least one is having an affair). A tombstone bears the image of hands praying over a Bible.
Terry is having an affair with a married woman. He “takes a break” during his shift one day to have sex with her, and we see the couple blurred out in the background going at it. The woman’s husband later discovers her infidelity.
The code that Will mistook for a robbery actually means that people are having sex in a parked car. Mrs. Chetlo frequently calls in the violation since a local teenage boy likes to use her property for this act. We briefly spot the vehicle when Will drives past it. The boy’s head pops into view as he hears the siren, and we hear some noises from the couple, but nothing else is seen.
We learn that a husband and wife are each having an affair. The woman’s lover declares they never had “actual sex,” but crassly describes and pantomimes other sexual acts they did. There’s a crude reference to dogs having sex.
A woman wears some skimpy shorts to bed. A married couple snuggles as they sleep.
Terry tells Will that Capt. Murphy was married to another woman and that they had adopted a son. It appears the couple is no longer together.
As already stated above, Will fires his gun at Mrs. Chetlo, believing she’s an armed robber (since she has a knife in hand), but misses. (Mrs. Chetlo hadn’t heard Will enter the house due to noise-cancelling headphones.) She begins to hit him furiously, shoving her hand into his face and issuing threats about ruining his career. Realizing his mistake, Will keeps his hands in the air, telling the woman he doesn’t want to hurt her. He tries to get away, but Mrs. Chetlo is persistent, jumping on Will’s back and choking him. Will passes out and falls on top of Mrs. Chetlo—right into a table.
When Will regains consciousness, Mrs. Chetlo is already dead: A hunk of wood from the table is poking out of her skull, and blood is pooled around her. After Terry finds the hidden money, they trash the Chetlo residence and clean their tracks to make it look like a robbery.
Terry tells Will early on that nothing ever happens in Providence except the occasional bar fight or stolen boat. However, we learn the small town is home to not just one but two professional killers, the Irishman and the Colombian.
Long story short, Mrs. Chetlo would have died regardless of Will’s accident. Someone had hired the Colombian to murder her and put the money in the basket as payment. He still wants to be paid for his trouble (the woman is dead, isn’t she?) and threatens the one who hired him. And once he discovers who took the money, he hunts them down and kills at least one person.
The Irishman has his own contract to kill someone. He attempts to strangle his target, but the man fights back. They headbutt, hit and kick each other until the Irishman throws his target through a glass window. But before he can finish the job, a woman shoots the Irishman through the chest with a speargun. His would-be victim then ties an anchor to the Irishman’s ankle and pushes him off the pier into the water.
More people are killed in the search for the missing money. Most are shot (including one in the face) but at least one is stabbed. (We see these acts occur onscreen.)
A man who hired the Colombian is later upset by the manner in which the victim died, finding it gruesome. He’s further upset when he learns that it wasn’t the assassin but a third party who killed the victim, disturbed that someone else may have wanted her dead, too.
We learn a man was bullied as a child. As an adult, when he became a cop, he wrongly pulled his former bully over and proceeded to beat the man to a pulp in revenge.
A dog is hit and killed by a car. We hear a woman’s husband went “crazy” and killed three people after getting hit in the head with a tree branch. A woman openly carries a gun on her person, using it as an intimidation factor. People are threatened.
We hear more than 60 uses of the f-word and more than 20 of the s-word. The c-word is also used once, along with multiple uses of “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “d–k,” “h—” and “p-ss.”
God’s name is abused six times, twice paired with “d–n.” Christ’s name is abused another three times, too.
Capt. Murphy warns Terry to “cut the swearing” at one point. He feigns shock, claiming to be unaware that he was doing so. And he spends the rest of the film tallying up most of the profanities we hear.
Folks drink at a bar. Will pointedly asks Paige not to get Terry too drunk when they have him over for dinner since he’ll have to patrol with him the next day. Paige ignores this, continuing to serve Terry wine well past the man’s limits.
Terry is your worst idea of a lazy cop. He spends the better part of Will’s first day on the job (before the Chetlo incident) teaching Will the best places to get free coffee and encouraging Will to get a hobby to do while on shift since the job is slow. When he throws garbage at a trashcan and misses, he leaves the garbage on the ground. And he ditches Will mid-shift to go have sex with his girlfriend, asking Will to wait and warn him if the woman’s husband comes home.
It’s during one of these afternoon delights that Will gets the call to go to the Chetlo house. He tries to alert Terry, but the man doesn’t hear him. Then, Terry’s girlfriend’s husband comes home. The man accuses Will of sleeping with his wife, so Will decides to abandon Terry.
If Terry had been where he was supposed to be, many of the bad things that followed could have been prevented.
That said, folks should be held accountable for their own poor decisions. Lying is the main offender. Some character might not have died if they’d simply told the truth. And others try to justify their illegal actions to make themselves feel better—which is arguably just a lie they tell themselves. And it sorta makes you wonder how things would have gone down if people had just been honest.
Greed is another factor. And most of the deaths that occur throughout this film are fueled by it. (It’s suggested that Terry has staged a crime before, though never a murder.)
A woman breaks some laws out of an earnest desire to protect her family. Unfortunately, she takes things too far, gets greedy and winds up putting them all in danger instead.
In an attempt to cover his and Will’s tracks, Terry pulls over an ex-girlfriend for speeding, shouting at her and insulting her in front of her children. The woman is equally crass and shouts right back. We hear that a cop used to take bribes.
Will has a burst blood vessel in his eye. It’s a bit unseemly, and many people comment negatively about it throughout the film. A woman eats peanut butter off a spoon after letting her dog lick it. Will vomits after realizing he killed Mrs. Chetlo. A man cleans up fish guts in a harbor.
Terry is learning to speak Mandarin. But when Will mistakenly calls it “Chinese” (as is printed on the learning CD Terry is using), he tells Will not to be racist.
An assassin tries to argue that knowing you aren’t a good person is better than falsely believing you are. He justifies his profession, stating that being a killer for hire is no worse than being a taxpayer whose taxes fund the military and therefore wars.
“It was my number one piece of advice,” Terry says to Will. “Don’t kill anybody unless you have to!”
Well, I’m sure that’s what Will would have preferred. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. And things just spin out of control from there.
Lies, selfishness and greed take over. Ten people die. And a little boy is orphaned.
It’s tragic. The fact that we witness this all take place onscreen is no less tragic for viewers.
But that’s not all we see. Extramarital affairs become key plot points in this tale, and we see one couple going at it in the blurred-out background of one scene. Language is a major caveat, too, with profanities hitting triple digits.
Greedy People poses as a dark comedy. But especially as the film comes to a climax, it’s far less comedy and far more dark than you might expect.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
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