Un étranger parmi nous

This paint by numbers made for TV melodrama is exactly what you'd expect of its ilk. The kind of thing they play wall to wall on the Lifetime channel, where men are all b*stards and women are all victims.

This particular tale tells the story of a woman whose son she gave up for adoption when she was young comes knocking on her door. But is he everything he claims to be? You'll know everything that's going to happen 30 minutes before they do. Thankfully the cast are competent and make the best of the limited material they have been presented with.

A harmless 30 minutes but don't expect any surprises.

The Good:

Decent cast

The Bad:

Rather bland

Highly predictable

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

It's perfectly rational to allow someone to move in with you without doing any research on their background at all

This was an outstanding TV film on "Lifetime" and had lots of action and suspense. This family had a great home and were running into financial problems and all of a sudden a long lost son appears at their doorstep, Andrew Kraulis,(Jamie Fisher), who gains the love and support of this family and is adored by his mom, Linda Purl,(Katherine Norris). The plot gets quite involved and there is plenty of action through out the entire film. If you want to see a great film with great acting, some romance, and the suspense of not knowing how the film with end, watch and enjoy this one! The ending is quite interesting and I bet you will never guess what happens.

I like this Movie. It's a great thriller I give it an 8 out of 10

Every few months -not more frequently than that- a quite good Lifetime movie turns up. This is one of them. Especially surprising is that the movie is directed by Lifetime's most frequent director, Douglas Jackson, usually an uninspired, unimaginative, pedestrian director. Perhaps this movie shows that Jackson is capable of decent work when he is given a screenplay much better than standard dull Lifetime fare and actors superior to Lifetime's potted amateurs. This movie is relatively well written, the plot moves along nicely and the performers are quite good, up to the standards of the consistently reliable Linda Purl. With the exception of Lifetime's ubiquitous and wooden Sophie Gendron, the actors here are professional and create interesting characters. In spite of the derivative nature of the plot and the unavoidable Lifetime tropes, I suspect that you will be pleasantly surprised by this movie.

The accomplice hamming it up really got on my nerves, but everyone else played their roles believably. Liz was honestly the worst part of the movie, and a couple of times her presence nearly made me turn the movie off. She seemed like a person that Mitch got involved with, but couldn't ditch for whatever reason....until the time was right, as you'll see in the movie.

The movie is full of holes. Even for a 2004 movie, there still seems to be too little interest in confirming his identity. Also kind of interesting how in 2022, Lifetime movies are still not confirming identities with the technology available. Felt really bad for the father since he was just as onboard with welcoming "Jamie" as his wife was. I didn't realize Lifetime movies have been using that particular method of death for so long. It's very popular in their more recent movies. I also don't remember a scene where the two criminals stated how they found out about the family and the earlier adoption. Not to mention that the friend sees Kathleen and "Jamie" at the bank, and senses something is off. Yet the bank manager accepts the shadiest reason for withdrawing a million dollars and transferring it to an international bank, and decides to fast track it instead of sticking to protocol. He should be fired. Wouldn't part of his job be to sense red flags in transactions just like this?

The ending was a bit corny given that technically Kathleen wasn't Real! Jamie's mother anymore and his adoptive mother seemed to love him. But I get the movie tried to show happily ever after.

It made for decent background noise in the kitchen.