My Daughter's Secret

While this film would almost certainly would have been mediocre regardless of casting, the actress (Jennifer Grant) who plays the mother's emotionless performance was so distracting that I couldn't focus on the rest of the movie. It's rather obvious that she's only getting work because she's the attractive daughter of a Hollywood legend. They may as well have casted a mannequin in the role -- they might have gotten a significantly more emotional performance if they had.

The plot itself is typical "daughter accidentally gets herself in trouble" fair. Aside from Statue-face, whose performance was abysmal, the actors were mediocre.

Young girl 'innocently' ends up playing look-out while her boyfriend and his psychotic brother rob the jewelry store where the girl's mom works; after an employee is shot and killed, the girl feels the shame of guilt at being involved, but obstinately shuns her caring mother (who acts like this is abnormal behavior for a teenage girl!). The kind of hopeless, hapless TV-movie wherein everybody on-camera has been cast in the hopes of reminding viewers of somebody else. Nina Dobrev looks a lot like Vanessa Hudgens or a younger Katie Holmes, Steve Byers looks like a blond Keanu Reeves (and has apparently studied Reeves' patented tics), while Catherine Mary Stewart could be filling in for Hillary Swank. Product such as this is ground out for bored couch-potatoes, uninterested really in whether or not the picture is a good one as long as it keeps them awake. There's a sympathetic performance by likable Norman Mikeal Berketa (who looks a bit like Jeffrey Tambor), and the all's-well-that-ends-well conclusion is good for an unintentional laugh.

The movie is all about the terrible female angst of the lead character, who was implicated in a robbery/homicide by her lowlife boyfriend. But if you ever watched a cop show in your life, you know that the moment she didn't get out of that car and run and call the cops, she was an accomplice. And every day that she continues to cover up her boyfriend's guilt, she is an accomplice after the fact. She's an amoral criminal and I don't see how anyone can possibly feel sorry for her or be concerned about her "plight." Legally she is as responsible for the murder as the guy who pulled the trigger.

Anyway I'm sitting here watching it, so what's that say about me :-)

For those of you familiar with the beautiful city of Ottawa, you will at least get to see some recognizable sites in this film. That is the highlight of this film for me as it was entirely predictable with mediocre acting. The character of the daughter is just downright irritating and annoying and viewers might just want to reach through their television screens and throttle her because of her stupidity. The only other redeeming quality of this film are the cameos by those outstanding Canadian actors, Sophie Gendron and Benz Antoine. As I have to add another two lines before this gets posted, I must say that I am probably being generous by giving this film 3 out of 10.

This was pretty awful. No, it was unbearably awful. Bad acting on ALL counts, one- dimensional characters (at best), storyline weak, rush and unlikeable. I was in the mood for one of those terrible, made-for-Lifetime-movies; you know the type, with has-been actors, and transparent, weakly delivered plots, bad staging, poor dialogue... Meredith Baxter- Birney, Judith Light... the usual suspects. This was more-or-less like that, but disappointing, in that it wasn't even innocently cheesy. However, I kept thinking that the mom in this one (Jennifer Grant?) would have been better cast as Heidi Fleiss in a bio-pic of the madam's life. They have similar equine features, and can't act. Other than that, pfft.