by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was called A
Mother’s Greatest Fear, though it was shot
under the working title A Mother’s Worst Fear, and I originally didn’t plan to watch it because the
title made it sound too much like Every Mother’s Worst Fear, a film I’d seen on Lifetime in 2005 even though it
was a 1998 theatrical release from Universal featuring real-life mother and
daughter Cheryl and Jordan Ladd in a story of a young girl who falls victim to
a human trafficker and her mom, who rescues her with the aid of a police
detective and a reclusive computer nerd who’s able to hack into the villains’
computers. A Mother’s Greatest Fear
revolves around the Goulds: mom Alice (Katrina Begin, top-billed); dad Brent
(Joey Lawrence), who’s a business partner with Alice in a land-development
company as well as being her husband; and their daughter Maddy (Lily Delamere),
who’s getting restive under her mother’s relentless overprotectiveness. It
turns out that Alice was formerly a police officer whose specialty was
negotiating in hostage situations, and she worked with a partner, a detective
named Steve Roberts (David
Chokachi) who had the hots for her, though their relationship vibrated with
mutual sexual attraction but stopped short of actual consummation. Their
careers got derailed when they were assigned to go after a young man named Nick
(Ian Niles), who had kidnapped his girlfriend Lily (Samm Wiechec) and was
threatening to kill her with a knife at her throat if she didn’t leave home and
run away with him. Alice tried to bring Nick down with a gun, but her shot went
wild and wounded Lily instead of Nick, whereupon Nick stabbed Lily fatally —
and Alice blamed herself for Lily’s death, quit the police force and joined her
husband’s business as his partner. This experience has made Alice fanatically
overprotective towards her daughter Maddy, who in the opening scene asks for
permission to attend a party with her high-school classmates (she’s a senior
but her mom is still driving her to school every morning, a fact for which her
fellow students rib her), and mom gives her a flat-out no.
Maddy sneaks out and
goes to the party anyway, putting cushions in her bed so when mom looks in
she’ll think Maddy is still asleep. Maddy steals a pair of silver-flecked
designer shoes of her mom’s and walks to the party but leaves when the other
kids there start passing around a bottle of wine and drinking from it. (Of
course I couldn’t resist the obvious Brett Kavanaugh joke that one of the guys
who stayed at the party would try to rape one of the girls who stayed, and 36
years later he’d end up on the U.S. Supreme Court.) Alas, she’s followed on her
way walking home by a stranger in a mysterious SUV, who parks in such a way as
to block Maddy’s passage and knocks her out with an anesthetic, then throws her
into the back of the car and drives off with her. The kidnapper then takes
Maddy to what looks like a boiler room and ties her to a pipe, gagging her so
she can’t scream for help, and when Maddy asks what ransom he wants, the kidnapper
responds by flashing a note reading, “Do not call the police.” Maddy is allowed
to talk to her mom on the phone just long enough to say she’s been kidnapped
and the kidnapper has told her not to involve the police. Mom decides that
since she and her friend Steve — who’s now working as a security guard after he
quit the force over the Lily incident — used to be cops, they can solve Maddy’s
kidnapping themselves without having to report the crime officially. The film
then cuts between the rather dull scenes between Maddy and her abductor — who’s
dressed all in black, with a hood and a plastic mask that makes him look like
Darth Vader (or someone wearing a cheap knockoff of the Darth Vader costume
altered just enough that it won’t infringe on Lucasfilm’s copyrights), and I
couldn’t help but wonder why the kidnapper was staying mute instead of speaking
with the dubbed voice of James Earl Jones — and the more interesting scenes as
Alice and Steve investigate the crime. There’s also a third plot strain that emerges
around Alice’s husband Brent, who in dealings he’s carefully concealed from
Alice has formed a partnership to develop a New York condo building with a
mysterious man named Tony, who keeps calling Alice to complain that Brent is
dodging meetings with him during his latest business trip to New York.
Of
course, in just about every Lifetime movie in which a married man takes a lot
of out-of-town “business trips,” “business trip” is code for “affair,” and so
it turns out here — though instead of being based in New York, as I might have
expected, Brent’s adulterous inamorata is right here at home: she’s Victoria (Tandi Tugwell), Alice’s office
assistant, and in addition to him taking her along on his out-of-town “business
trips” he’s trysting with her in L.A., where the film takes place, often
screwing her in out-of-the-way locations in the building where their office is.
Alice and Steve are convinced that Maddy’s kidnapper is either a would-be
boyfriend she rejected — they trace down a kid at a coffeehouse and also zero
in on one of Maddy’s teachers, Josh Hammer (Demetrius Stear), because they’ve
been carrying on an e-mail correspondence including romantic poetry, though
that’s a dead end because he’s just her writing teacher and he was critiquing
her work. They even think Nick might have masterminded the kidnapping from
prison and got a friend of his outside to do it, but when they visit Nick in
prison and confront him he’s able to convince them he wasn’t involved. Then
they decide to look at Brent and Steve gets a tip from an old friend of his, a
woman who works with the FBI, that Brent was under investigation for money
laundering and quite a lot of illicit cash has been flowing through the
business, recorded in secret online books Brent didn’t let Alice see. Tony, his
mystery partner in the New York condo development, is a mobster whom Brent took
money from because he was too much in debt on his other projects to get capital
from legitimate sources (this begins to sound like Donald Trump and makes me
wonder if 30 years later Brent will run for President and appoint one of the
kids from that drunken party to the Supreme Court!). Alice and Steve conclude
that Maddy’s kidnapping has something to do with Brent’s mob ties and Tony is
involved somehow, but then there’s a confrontation scene back in the boiler
room between Maddy and her kidnapper. Maddy gets close enough to the abductor
to rip off that Darth Vader mask, and [spoiler alert!] the kidnapper turns out to be a woman — Victoria, the
office assistant Brent was having his affair with. Her motive in kidnapping
Maddy was that she was pissed off at Brent for breaking too many of their dates
and spending his time either on genuine business or with his lawfully
recognized family, so she concocted a scheme to kidnap Maddy and see which woman in his life Brent turned to when his offspring
was in mortal danger — Alice or Victoria.
When it turned out to be Alice,
Victoria determined either to kill Maddy or to sell her to a sex trafficking
ring — “At least I can get some money from the bitch,” she offhandedly says —
only she gets hers when Brent recalls a part of the building where he used to
take Victoria to fuck her, and he, Alice and Steve realize that that’s where
Victoria took Maddy. Victoria holds a knife to Maddy’s throat in an obviously
deliberate parallel to the flashback of the scene with Nick and Lily we saw
earlier, but ultimately Alice subdues her, Victoria is arrested, and in a tag
scene labeled “Three Months Later” Alice and Brent are negotiating an amicable
divorce, Brent is facing federal charges but Steve says he’s likely to get off
with probation, Alice has agreed to let Maddy go off to college in New York
(something she’d forbidden at the start of the film), and Alice and Steve are
clearly headed out to a romantic date. I didn’t like the ending — frankly, I
would have preferred it if Alice had said a sad goodbye to Steve, forgiven
Brent and been there to stand by him through his legal ordeal and help him
rebuild his business legitimately — and I also didn’t like some of the casting,
particularly Alice. Katrina Begin looks too good for the role: young, sexy, clad in tight tops
and even tighter jeans, she doesn’t for one minute look old enough to have a
daughter who’s a senior in high school. Indeed, she and Lily Delamere look more
like sisters than like mother and daughter. (Oddly, her hair designer gives
Begin a considerably uglier hairdo in the tag scene than she has in the rest of
the movie.) Also, neither of the two men in Alice’s life is particularly attractive
— Joey Lawrence as Brent shaves his head and has a moustache (virtually all his
scenes show him in close-up so we don’t get much of an idea what the rest of
his body is like), while David Chokachi as Steve is tall, blond and has a great
bod but is a bit too craggy-faced (and visibly old) to be man-meat dreamboat
material. And Tandi Tugwell is so much less attractive than Katrina Begin —
dark-haired and with an oddly lined face — one wonders why Brent is trading
down by having an affair with her
instead of staying with that hot, sexy wife of his! Nonetheless, A
Mother’s Greatest Fear is a
better-than-average Lifetime movie — at least the characters are personable and
there isn’t a super-villain whose powers defy credibility — and it stuck
closely enough to the Lifetime formula to “deliver the goods” while still
offering a few neat variations on it.
