Le serpent de septembre

The movie is straight trash but Melissa George is solid. The most interesting thing is how she manages to act with clowns who were picked off the street.

By the time "Second Chances" is finished, all you wish is that you had a second chance to live the hour and a half wasted on watching this. This is truly a dreadful movie, composed of a weak cast offering weak performances playing uninteresting characters filled with meaningless sub-plots and a main plot that was poorly developed and not that interesting. It's supposed to be about a former reporter filled with remorse about not helping the police capture a serial killer years before who is suddenly being targeted herself. Why, then, did we need to know about her former marriage - replete with flashbacks? Why, then, did there have to be a past romance between her and the cop on the case? Why, then, did there need to be this irritating professor at the college she's hired to teach ethics in journalism at who adds nothing to the story and offers perhaps the worst performance of a bunch of bad performances? Why, then, did she even need to have a son? And - my pet peeve - why did this Canadian movie have to pretend to be an American movie by placing itself in Cambridge, Massachussetts? (I mean, Kate could just as easily have left Toronto to teach in Peterborough.) On behalf of all Canadians, I apologize to the people of Cambridge for setting such a dreadful movie in your city. Those who put out this movie should now apologize to us all. 1/10

I just had a good laugh at sddavis63's review about wishing he had a second chance to get the last 1 1/2 hours of his life back after watching this. How true! It's funny how a bad movie has warning signs right from the get go and in this case, it was literally a sign in the form of a highway sign. I won't go into the details about the movie because they really don't matter, it's so poorly made that the details don't even matter.

The bottom line is there's this kid in a Canadian movie that's trying to pretend it's filmed in America, and as he's heading towards Boston, there's a highway sign which reads, Cambridge XXX miles and Boston XXX miles, (I'm surprised they didn't goof up and make the sign in kilometers). But the fatal flaw is you can tell the sign isn't real! The fonts are too small and it just clearly looks fake. It reminded me of when Wylie Coyote would see the Road Runner coming and he'd make a fake sign that said 'detour' and would be waiting at the top of a ravine with a giant bolder.

So that's all you need to know, the sign says it all. From there on in it's 1 and a 1/2 hour downhill boulder into a ravine.

I had an interest in seeing this movie due to Melissa George who plays Kate Fischer who lost everything due to withholding an interview she did with a serial killer that could have saved a life if she turned it into police right away. Melissa is a decent actress capable solid performances in TV (Alias) and film. She was passable at best here and every actor around her was awful. All of them are a boring, tired cliche or just plain useless in the film. Even worse, Kate's cop friend Lucas was downright terrible. He is horribly incompetent and not believable as a seasoned detective. Second Chances also has characters that do not serve to advance the plot at all. A key example is the professor that does not like Kate Fischer (Melissa George). In addition, once the perpetrators that are after Kate are revealed it was not some big twist or surprise at all. You could see it coming a mile away. The music used to build suspense and advance the story is bad as well, even for TV movie standards. I have watched other made for TV movies and went into this with low expectations and was still very disappointed, hence the low rating.

If I could think of a plus side, Melissa George looked gorgeous here; however, by the end of the movie I was bored and wanted to go to sleep. Skip this film if its on tv. Second Chances is not even one of those "so bad its good" films. Don't even give it one chance.

Was anyone responsible for researching the locations? They made it sound awful for the poor little boy who had to move all the way from Boston to Cambridge -- a whole 15 minute by car tragedy. Horrible for the little boy to move all the way from Boston to Cambridge -- a 15 minute trip! There are no new mini mansions with hugh laws and pools in Cambridge MA.

I couldn't watch because it was such a poorly imagined film. Do your research!