by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a movie called Hiding
that I’d recorded off Lifetime over the weekend. The way the Lifetime promos
ballyhooed it, it sounded like a brand-new film having its “world premiere,”
but apparently it had — or at least was meant to have — at least something of a
theatrical release in 2012. It’s the sort of frustrating movie that takes an
intriguing premise and gets far less out of it than one could imagine — what
happens to a high-school girl when she’s suddenly relocated into witness protection
and moved from New York City to Longview, Montana after her family is massacred
by a crime syndicate and, though she’s survived, the crooks think she’s dead
and so do all her old friends? Directed by Thomas J. Wright from a script by
Brian Hurwitz, Hiding is an
interesting fusion of gangster movie and high-school coming-of-age drama. The
survivor, Alicia Torres (played by Ana Villafañe, a singer whom I’d previously
not heard of, though she doesn’t get to sing here), is forced to adopt the
white-bread identity “Jo Russo” and is told by her handler, FBI Agent Noah
Carter (Dan Payne, who not surprisingly is older but considerably hotter than
any of the guys playing male Longview High School students!), to avoid anything connected with her past life. Accordingly, she’s
been outfitted with a cover story that she’s from Seattle and she’s been
solemnly told never to do anything she was known to have been interested in
before, including painting (her former hobby), and she’s also told not to let
on that she speaks Spanish — which makes it rather odd that she takes a Spanish
class but never utters a word of it while there even though she aces the
written tests. Like Kristen Stewart’s character in the first Twilight (a precursor I kept hearkening back to even though Hiding contains no supernatural element), instead of being
shunned by everybody Jo is instantly popular, particularly among two young men
in school, Brett (Jeremy Sumpter, the star swimmer led down the primrose path
by Internet porn in the Lifetime film cyber seduction: His Secret
Life, here playing a self-confident
B.M.O.C. instead of a nerdy guy whose only distinction is his prowess in the
pool) and Jesse (Tyler Blackburn), who hung out in the art lab, was working on
a mural painting of the New York cityscape, and thereby represented danger for
Jo because hanging around him was likely to “out” her as a New Yorker and an
artist. (I liked Jesse a lot
better than Brett — perhaps because he reminded me of me in my own high-school
days — and was rooting for him and Jo to get together at the end, but alas
writer Hurwitz had other ideas.)
But the main threats to Jo’s incognito are Zoë
(Kelcie Stranahan, who was the nice girl the boy in Dirty Teacher was dating until his hot, sexy teacher seduced him
instead), who’s jealous of Jo for taking Brett away from her and retaliates by
researching her background and finding that she has something to hide; and a mysterious hit man, Ostrog (Dean
Armstrong, who played Blake on the Showtime series Queer as Folk), who’s tracing Jo because the gang has realized
she’s alive after all and is being kept on ice by the feds so she can testify
against them when needed. Ostrog is tall, rather gangly, clearly Anglo and not
at all the sort of person one expects to see playing a hit man in a film these
days, but Armstrong’s performance is effectively sinister, especially in the
scene in which he wheedles the address of Jo’s “abuela” (the word literally
means grandmother, but the woman is simply a much older person who befriended
Jo and a lot of her fellow teenage girls back in New York), then visits her in
the nursing home and sees the card on a bouquet of flowers Jo sent her, which
leads him to Longview and a climax that takes place seemingly just because the
film has to end sometime: Jo is
about to borrow Brett’s truck to get away, but just before she gets in Ostrog
sneaks up behind her, chloroforms her and kidnaps her, then calls the gang and
tells them that he’s ready to kill her but only if they agree to pay him twice
the agreed-upon price for the deed. The cops manage to trace her via Brett’s
cell phone, which she also borrowed (one of the rules of witness protection, at
least as applied to Jo, was that she wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone), only
Ostrog is so good an assassin he instantly blows away the two pathetic Montana
cops who try to arrest him and wounds Carter, then goes tearing through the
woods to hunt down Jo, who’s running away from him, and he catches up with her
and is about to do the dirty deed when Carter, fortunately wounded but far from
dead, kills him.
It’s a
fascinating concept for a movie — what do you do when you’re a high-school kid
and the difficulties of adjusting to a new school and the internal politics of
its student body are compounded by the fact that your life is literally at stake if you disclose, intentionally or
accidentally, anything about who you really are and what your background has
been — but alas director Wright and writer Hurwitz miss as many opportunities
as they grab, sometimes portraying Jo’s dilemma sensitively and sometimes just
losing it, especially in the awkwardly cut-in flashback sequences that are
supposed to represent her PTSD-inducing memories of the crime; still, it was
better than the usual Lifetime fare even though it was far from their best (Speak, a high-school story based on an acknowledged
classic young-adult novel and starring the real Kristen Stewart just before she did Twilight, was considerably better), and Ana Villafañe is a
reasonably powerful screen presence and helps hold the film together.
