Vida Secreta

After applying glossy color to her full lips, 17-year-old high school student Nina Dobrev (as Justine Douglas) meets her 21-year-old blond boyfriend Steve Byers (as Brent) and his wavy-haired brother James Gilbert (as Reggie) for a weird date. The two young men work as automobile mechanics. They rob the jewelry store where Ms. Dobrev's mother Jennifer Grant (as Denise) works as a manager. For some reason, Dobrev is immediately employed as the getaway car lookout, although she has just learned about the crime and acts like a flight risk. Turns out, she can be trusted to go along with the plan...

After the robbery, Ms. Grant frets about daughter Dobrev's increasing strange behavior. Grant is the real-life daughter of Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon. She should worry, because this TV Movie is incredibly dumb. Even worse is the level of responsibility the story allows the daughter to take for her participation in the crime. For what it's worth, Mr. Gilbert does well with his sleazy character and Catherine Mary Stewart is always an attractive police detective.

*** My Daughter's Secret (10/7/07) Douglas Jackson ~ Nina Dobrev, Jennifer Grant, Steve Byers, James Gilbert

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.

A 17 year old girl inadvertently gets mixed up in a robbery planned by her boyfriend on the store her mother works in.

This lifetime movie isn't ground breaking but it's surprisingly watchable thanks to a good cast and good dialog.

Jennifer Grant as the mother is quite good.

The lovely pre Vampire Diaries Nina Dobrev takes a role that could have been annoying and makes her quite sympathetic especially when she does some irritating things.

It has a lesson about consequences about having the wrong boyfriend. Listen to your Moms girls!

Worth a watch.

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.