by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Stolen Daughter, which I had recorded on its “world premiere” showing on Lifetime some
months ago — August 1, I believe, since the commercial breaks included a promo
for the film Patient Killer,
which I watched on its “world
premiere” and commented on August 3. Lifetime movies generally run the gamut
from surprisingly good to flawed but capable (which is what I had to say about Patient
Killer) to entertaining trash to the
depths. This one was somewhere between the entertaining trash and the depths,
and judging from the imdb.com page, which gave “Wilkins” as the last name of
the central characters (considerably less risible than the one the filmmakers,
director Jason Bourque and writers Sue Bourque — who I presume is Jason’s wife
— and Daniel Winters finally came up with), the script went through some
last-minute changes before it got filmed. Stolen Daughter contains two parallel plot lines. The main one
centers around police detective Stacey Tipping (Andrea Roth) — see what I meant
about the Bourques and Winters giving this character and everyone in her family
a thoroughly silly last name? — who in the opening scene confronts a madman
who’s kidnapped a teenage girl and is about to kill her because, as he
explains, “She’s too beautiful to live.” Stacey and her partner, John Riley
(Keith MacKechnie), corner the guy but are too late to save the girl’s life.
Then Stacey wakes up in bed with her husband Jack (Steve Bacic, a considerably
better-looking guy than usually plays Lifetime’s non-psycho leading men), and
it turns out this is just a series of nightmares she’s been having reliving the
incident, which got her forcibly put on medical leave even though she’s chafing
at the bit and wants nothing more than to be put back on the force. Her
superiors finally agree to let her return, but only part-time and only on desk
duty.
Meanwhile, Martha Dixel (Rachel Hayward) is being paroled from prison
after serving a four-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter; when she was
involved in an auto accident and her husband and daughter Anna (seen in
flashbacks and played by Erika Shave-Gair) were killed, she sought out the guy
who’d done it and deliberately ran him down. As she’s released protesters outside the prison express their
displeasure that she wasn’t convicted of murder and sentenced either to life
imprisonment or the death penalty. No sooner is she outside the prison walls
than she’s nearly run over by a guy in a van — he’s backing up and doesn’t see
her — but the shock undoes all her rehabilitation and sends her back into her
former crazy state: she’s convinced the van driver is her husband and their
daughter is still alive. She steals the guy’s van and takes off, and by an
incredible bit of coincidence-mongering the Bourques and Winters should have
been ashamed of themselves over, Martha comes upon Stacey Tipping’s daughter
Sarah (Sarah Dugdale) at a barbecue party — Sarah and the boy she’s interested
in romantically have edged away from the party and are talking to each other on
some swings when Martha comes upon them, insists that Sarah is her daughter
Anna, pulls a gun on Sarah and kidnaps her. Martha drives away with Sarah in
her stolen van, and the rest of the movie intercuts the plotline of Martha with
Stacey Tipping’s kidnapped daughter and Stacey’s insistence on being allowed to
work the case despite the insistence of the officer in charge, Detective Garcia
(Curtis Caravaggio), that she doesn’t belong on the case. There’s some
potential for ambiguity in the writing that the Bourques and Winters don’t take
much advantage of — including one surveillance video shot in a convenience
store (and containing audio, which these things usually don’t) in which Sarah
seems to be playing up to Martha and Garcia immediately assumes she’s fallen
victim to the Stockholm syndrome and gone Patty Hearst on them (Patty Hearst’s
name is even mentioned on the soundtrack!), while Stacey angrily defends her
daughter’s honor and insists she’s just playing along with Martha’s delusion
for survival. (“Then she’s playing a really dangerous game,” Garcia and Riley
insist.) It gets to the point where Garcia sets up an interview for Stacey with
a reporter, telling her it will help if the TV audience gets to see the
Grieving Mother, but the reporter’s first question is about how in Stacey’s last search for an abducted child the kid died, and what
makes her think this one is going
to turn out any differently? Stacey angrily walks out of the interview and,
when Garcia admits he set it up to get her kicked off the case, she punches out
her fellow cop and colleague.
Stacey is suspended from the force and has to
turn in her badge and gun, but does that stop her? No-o-o-o-o, acting now more like an avenging mom than a cop,
she browbeats a friend of Martha’s who spent time with her in prison (after
nearly being walloped by the woman’s boyfriend, a club-wielding guy identified
only as “Shirtless Junkie” and played by Colby Chartrand, who not surprisingly
is the sexiest guy in the film!) and tricks her into giving away Martha’s
likely hiding place — a cabin near a lake where the Dixel family used to go
fishing before the catastrophe. She calls in the tip and of course the cops
tell her to wait for backup, while, equally predictably, she doesn’t; armed
with a gun she “borrowed” from the friend of Martha’s she interrogated al
fresco, she confronts Martha directly, they
have a gunfight (in which, incidentally, Stacey fires far more bullets than the
gun she’s using — a six-shot revolver — is likely to contain) and, when
Martha’s gun runs out of ammo they have a fight and They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Watkins, your
plagiarism attorney thanks you for such a wonderfully reliable income stream),
and as they’re struggling for it Sarah herself grabs a rock, clubs Martha with
it and subdues her so she can be taken into custody when the other, still
on-duty cops arrive. Stolen Daughter’s
main problem is the sheer preposterousness of the plot — any story which depends so totally on coincidence as its
driving force is going to have a hard time keeping the audience’s disbelief
suspended — and it also doesn’t help that Andrea Roth and Rachel Hayward look
so much alike, both being tall, thin blondes with long, willowy hair, that only
when Jason Bourque moves in for a closeup can you really tell them apart (though
at least that makes it more believable that Sarah Dugdale could be Roth’s
daughter and Hayward’s character could mistake her for her daughter). That said, the performances of the women
are by far the most powerful aspects of the movie — this is one Lifetime movie
in which the gynocentricity of their plotting works to the film’s advantage, as
the males in the movie are either boring or turds (or both). Still, there was a
lot more potential in this premise than the Bourques and Winters realized —
though there’s an in-joke of the kind that Lifetime is starting to run into the
ground: in an early scene, before her own daughter is kidnapped, Stacey is at
the police station running through computer files of missing girls, and one of
them is named “Anna Bourque.”
