by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was A Deadly Adoption, a Lifetime movie which had its “world premiere” on Saturday and which
was a completely typical Lifetime movie, a sort of compendium of Lifetime’s
Greatest Hits, and remarkable only in that somehow the producers of this film
(all nine of them) got Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig to star in it. Now Will
Ferrell may not be as mega-popular now as he was a decade ago, but he’s still a
name to conjure with on the big
screen, and Kristen Wiig is a frequent co-star of his in movies like Anchorman
2, The Spoils of Babylon and Welcome
to Me (and they met while they were both in
the cast of Saturday Night Live —
a stint on SNL seems as de
rigueur for an aspiring comic now as a shot
on The Tonight Show with Johnny
Carson once did), and much of the debate about this project on line centers
around whether Ferrell and Wiig intended to take it seriously. Some of the
imdb.com “Trivia” posts about it say Ferrell, Wiig, director Rachel Goldenberg
and writer Andrew Steele intended this as a “secret” project and either didn’t
want it released at all or did it only as a parody of Lifetime as a genre. Whatever its intentions, what we actually get is an
ultra-“serious” Lifetime film which begins with a scene in the lakefront home
of writer Robert Benson (Will Ferrell) — he concocts financial self-help books
and has become a star within the genre — and his wife Sarah (Kristen Wiig). They’re having a picnic with a
few friends and Sarah, though six months pregnant with their second child,
insists on going for a boat ride alone — only the dock, which Robert has told
his friends was unsafe and he was planning to have repaired, collapses before
she can get into the boat and she nearly drowns. She’s saved, but her unborn
baby dies and a complication in the surgery that saved her life makes it
impossible for her to have children again. In the meantime Robert and Sarah
obsess over the one child they do
have, daughter Sully (Alyvia Alyn Lind) — a first name that sounds jarring
through the entire movie (not Sally, Sully — the only real person I’ve ever heard of with the first name “Sully”
was Kay Kyser band singer Sully Mason, and he was a guy), and decide to go to an adoption agency
to find her a brother to replace the one that died in the accident while he was
still in Sarah’s womb. An added complication is that Sully is a heavy-duty
diabetic for whom the merest bite of normal candy is life-threatening (and, not
surprisingly, trying to keep a kid whose age is still in single digits from eating candy is a major parenting challenge for the Bensons).
They get a
visit from Bridget Wilson (Jessica Lowndes), who’s willing to put up her unborn
baby boy for adoption, and the Bensons have her move in with them for the
duration of her pregnancy — only we get a typical Lifetime shot of Bridget
smirking at Robert and looking at him with undisguised lust, indicating that
like quite a few Lifetime anti-heroines before her she intends to do away with
Sarah and take her place as Robert’s spouse. Later we get another typical
Lifetime scene in which we see Bridget being accosted on the street by a
sleazy-looking guy in a pickup truck; the sleazy guy turns out to be Dwayne
Tisdale (Jake Weary, who since he’s playing a villain is naturally the
hottest-looking male in the film!), and he and Bridget are in some kind of scam
to make money off the Bensons. Still later we get a scene in which Sully stumbles
upon Bridget in the shower and notices Bridget is wearing a prosthetic device
over her chest to make her look
pregnant when she really isn’t — and though Bridget gives her the preposterous
explanation that she’s just wearing it to look more visibly pregnant than she
is, we get it immediately. “Oh,”
I said to myself at this point, “instead of doing the clichéd gimmick that
she’s really pregnant and Robert is the biological father, they’re doing the
clichéd gimmick that she’s merely faking being pregnant.” I was only half-wrong in my initial assumption;
Bridget — whose real name is Joni Weatherly and who impersonated the real
Bridget to get into the Benson household (and presumably either she or Dwayne
murdered the real one) — did have
an affair, or at least a one-night stand, with Robert when he was on his last
book tour, and though for Robert it was a meaningless quickie, Bridget
immediately fell in love (or the crazed Lifetime simulacrum thereof) with him
and determined to get him permanently.
Writer Steele has so carefully “planted”
hints about Robert’s fears — he hasn’t wanted to go back into the lake again
since his wife’s accident (though he’s continued to live there — one would have
thought if he were so traumatized the first thing he would have done is sell
the house and move to one nowhere near any large bodies of water) — that it’s a lead-pipe cinch that the
finale will involve him having to
dive in the water and use a boat to rescue Sully, who’s been kidnapped by Joni
and Dwayne. That was Dwayne’s plan from the get-go — to take the girl and hold
her for a $1 million ransom from the Bensons — though it got complicated by
Joni’s demented affection for Robert and her determination to stay with him and
displace Sarah in his affections. Dwayne is discovered by Charlie (Bryan Safi),
who’s Gay (though he’s a typical movie Gay man in that he’s never actually
shown having a romantic or sexual interest in another man) and works for Sarah
in her business selling organic fruits and vegetables at local produce stands.
(Why she needs this preposterous
job when her husband is a multi-millionaire from his writing is never quite
explained; even if she wanted to work in the field, surely he could have bought
her a supermarket instead of leaving her standing on streetcorner stands!)
There is a nice little scene in
which Charlie calls the police to report Dwayne’s existence and his involvement
with Joni a.k.a. Bridget — and Bryan Safi deftly manipulates his voice to show
that, even though he knows Dwayne is a dangerous criminal, he’s also got the
hots for him — but later, when Charlie traces Dwayne and Joni to their hideouts
in the woods near the lake, Dwayne punches him out and then kills him.
Eventually it ends with Joni invading the Bensons’ home, taking Sully, shooting
Robert and locking Sarah in the garage with the motor of her car running so
she’ll die of carbon monoxide poisoning and it will look like she committed
suicide — and for good measure she shoots Dwayne as well, though she’s such an
incompetent murderess all three people she tries to kill are still alive at the fade-out and Dwayne
is traced by the police and arrested. Robert has to dive into the river and
start an outboard motorboat to escape from Joni, who’s firing a gun at both him
and Sully, only Joni’s murderous assault is stopped by … Sarah, who after
Robert rescued her from their garage but before he set out after their
kidnapped daughter, grabbed the gun Sarah had left behind after she
(non-fatally) shot Robert at home and uses it to take Joni out before she can
do their family any more harm. A Deadly Adoption — one wonders why it wasn’t called The
Perfect Adoption, unless Christine Conradt
owns the rights to the “Perfect … ” series title — is a virtual compendium of
Lifetime clichés, including the kidnapping of a diabetic kid (who was done
considerably better in 12 Hours to Live), and one can readily understand the conviction of writers like Drew
McWeeny at hitfix.com (http://www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/is-a-deadly-adoption-the-years-most-straight-faced-prank)
that Ferrell, Wiig, Goldenberg and Steele made this as a deliberate parody of
the Lifetime movie genre — but I
think they were totally serious about it. I wondered if Will Ferrell’s film
career has been tanking badly enough he would need to do a Lifetime movie, but his imdb.com page says
otherwise; it says he’s currently filming Daddy’s Home and Zoolander 2, has finished a film called Zeroville that’s already in post-production, and is in
pre-production on three other projects: Tom’s Dad, The House and Russ and Roger Go Beyond (in which he’s playing 1960’s sexploitation
filmmaker Russ Meyer in a film about the making of Beyond the Valley
of the Dolls).
