by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched a
surprisingly compelling Lifetime movie I’d been after for a while and had
previously missed recording because of one glitch or another: The Bad Son, a chilling thriller which kicks off when Seattle
police receive a report that 16-year-old Colleen Brennan (Kimberly Warnat) is
missing. She ran away from her home in Ohio two years before and her parents
never heard from her until she called them a week before their disappearance
and told him she was coming home for a visit — only she never showed, and her
dad Michael (Roman Podhora) has come to Seattle to look for her. The case falls
to Detective Ronnie McAdams (Catherine Dent), a tough, no-nonsense figure at
work but one who’s having trouble keeping her own 16-year-old daughter Christy
(Tegan Moss) at home: Christy has already dropped out of high school, run off
to Phoenix with a 20-something bartender, and when that didn’t work she slunk
home but almost immediately got mixed up with Trey (Adam Battrick), a guy who
works at a tattoo parlor and gets her popped when he takes her for a ride in a
stolen car. Ronnie has worked for years without a partner but she gets assigned
one on this case: Mark Petrocelli (Tom McBeath), a 30-year veteran who’s
obsessed with two similar disappearances six and four years earlier, also
high-school dropout runaways. (We saw the first of these cases play out in a
pre-credits prologue.) What’s more, he’s convinced he knows who did it, and
he’s certain that Colleen was murdered by the same person — security guard John
David Finn (Ben Cotton, a fascinating actor I haven’t seen before because his
major credits have been in films like The Chronicles of Riddick,
Slither, 30 Days of Night: Dark Days and
The Rock’s remake of Walking Tall;
he’s dorky-looking but also attractive in a kind of lost teddy-bear way and one
can readily see what the runaways whom he picks up find attractive about him),
who killed Rebecca, beat her face in and poured acid on her face and hands
post-mortem so it would be hard to identify her by facial features or
fingerprints.
When Colleen’s dead body indeed turns up, Petrocelli is convinced
he’s right, but he’s up against a formidable obstacle: Finn’s mother, Frances
Reynolds (a marvelously chilling performance by Marilyn Norry), is a civilian employee
of the Seattle Police Department, and as a result she has access to all the
case reports and uses them to sabotage any case against her son and alert him
to what the police are doing next with his case. She’s also filed innumerable
complaints against Petrocelli with the Seattle PD’s Internal Affairs
department. As the case develops it turns out that Mrs. Reynolds is not only
covering up for her son but is actively involved in his crimes, while he’s a
weakling who targets teenagers who look like mom did when she first married his
dad (a servicemember who was killed); he’s driven not just by rage but a
particular rage against his mother, who comes on like a lover as she tells him
that virtually every woman he takes an interest in isn’t good enough for him.
The crimes aren’t a folie à deux
but a folie à trois, the third
person being mom’s brother Gerry O’Connor (Paul Jarrett), who helped raise Finn
when both his real dad and his stepdad (who lasted just long enough to give his
mom the name “Reynolds” and died within a year, ostensibly of a heart attack,
though from what we see it’s entirely possible that mom dispatched him) died
before Finn’s first birthday. The cops are able to trace Finn’s latest
girlfriend, another high-school dropout runaway named Rebecca Keenan (Shauna
Kain), and catch him in the act of tying her up and handcuffing her to an
overhead pipe in preparation for doing her in like he has the three others,
with mom as an active co-conspirator and uncle as the lookout, and they’re able
to arrest the Terrible Trio but can’t make the case until uncle, the only one
of the three with any remaining moral sense at all, flips on the other two and
turns state’s evidence.
It’s hard to believe that the case is based on a true
story — the parallel between Finn targeting teenage runaway girls and Ronnie
having a runaway daughter herself (who, not surprisingly, makes up with mom,
moves back home with her and re-starts high school at the end) is a bit too
forced and pat to make this believable as fact-based fiction — but that doesn’t
matter: The Bad Son is a winner
all the way around, powerfully written by Richard Leder, with Neill Fearnley’s
direction blessedly free of the over-directorial tricks many Lifetime directors
have laden their films with, and brilliantly acted by an impeccable cast. For
once the actors playing the good guys aren’t overwhelmed by the actors playing
the bad guys, good as Cotton and Norry are (Norry has some of the same sinister
restraint as Hitchcock’s “cool blondes,” and if the Kim Novak character in Vertigo had survived that film one could easily imagine
Norry’s character here as her 20 to 30 years later); the chemistry between the
committed, energetic Dent and the dyspeptic, bitter McBeath rivals that between
Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay in Law and Order: Special
Victims Unit and makes one wish the
producers of this had, as some imdb.com posters suggested, pursued a TV series
with the two leads playing the same cop characters (and there’s a hint of a
continuation in a tag scene that indicates they’re going to continue to work as
partners). The Bad Son is an
example of Lifetime at its best, and I’m going to be haunted by Ben Cotton’s
chilling banality-of-evil performance for a long time to come!
