Showcase film based on ex-con’s tale

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This article was published 30/04/2011 (5583 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For a guy in his first week on the job as an undercover crime-gang infiltrator, Alex Caine has a pretty measured and pithy perspective:

“Going new places, meeting new people — it’s like Club Med, for people with a death wish.”

Alex, played by Canadian actor Tim Rozon (Flashpoint, Instant Star) is the former special-forces agent and low-rent ex-con at the heart of Befriend and Betray, a shot-in-Toronto TV movie that has its premiere tonight at 10 on Showcase TV.

It’s an ambitious cops-and-gangsters tale that looks and feels very much like a series pilot but is being presented as a stand-alone film event (which is a bit unusual, considering that Showcase has premiered two other homegrown drama series in the past two weeks).

According to the network’s press notes, Befriend and Betray is based on the real-life story of Canadian undercover cop Alex Caine, whose autobiography was published under the same title. It focuses on Caine, a 30-year-old former inmate who was raised in the mean streets of Montreal but is trying to build an on-the-level post-prison life in downtown Toronto.

Having received lethal martial-arts training while serving in the U.S. military during its occupation of Iraq, Alex is using those skills to run a karate school for kids and their fitness-inclined parents. His commitment to an average civilian lifestyle also includes a budding romance with Melanie (Christine Horne), a grad student who’s eager to distance herself from her very affluent upbringing.

Alex’s pursuit of normalcy is interrupted by an encounter with Asian-mob member Winstead “P.C.” Lau (Byron Mann), with whom he had a previous relationship based on time spent in the same prison wing. P.C. (the nickname apparently stands for Prince Charles, because he once dispatched an enemy with a polo mallet) is looking for a way to advance himself in the Kam Tin triad, and figures help from a badass ex-con like Alex might improve his chances.

He offers Alex a chance to get in on a deal to move heroin into the Quebec market; when Alex declines, P.C. turns the offer into a demand by threatening to harm Melanie if he doesn’t agree.

Being as committed to his romance as he is opposed to revisiting his criminal past, he tells Melanie about the threat and she insists they go to the police; because he’s an ex-con, the local cops are quick to dismiss his request for protection.

But the very next day, he receives a phone call from Sgt. Guy Poirier (former Winnipegger Tom Jackson), head of an agency called Criminal Intelligence Service, who invites him to a meeting and offers him protection if he agrees to become an undercover operative tasked with using his relationship with P.C. to infiltrate the Kam Tin organization.

Somewhat surprisingly, he agrees, and is immediately briefed about the triad and outfitted with what seems to be a rather rudimentary collection of communications gadgetry.

From there, Befriend and Betray follows a rather predictable route through clandestine meetings, botched surveillance efforts, mob-style mayhem and ever-deeper infiltration of the organized-crime structure. Eventually, as is always the case in these sorts of stories, Alex is placed in a situation where he must prove himself to his criminal cohorts by crossing the line into perhaps-murderous behaviour.

Despite the fact there’s a heavy dose of seen-this-before in the storyline, Befriend and Betray remains watchable because of an appealing (but completely fake) friendship that evolves between Alex and P.C. The farther each advances toward his ultimate goal, the more they must depend on each other under increasingly dangerous circumstances.

Of course, they don’t really have each other’s backs, but there are times, given some of the turf-protecting antics of his anti-gang-team colleagues, that Alex is left feeling that he might be better off with P.C. than with the police.

It’s hard to say, based on this one-off adventure, if there’s enough in Befriend and Betray to merit a continuing series commitment. But there’s a pretty clear message in the way the network is presenting it, so the betting here is that this will likely be the last time we see Alex Caine before Showcase’s programmers send him very, very deep under cover, indeed.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca