Cheerleader Abduction (Lifetime Pictures, Robbins Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Lifetime ran a movie that was sort of an outlier in their “Fear the Cheer” series because, while it was called Cheerleader Abduction, the fact that the teenage heroine was a cheerleader was pretty incidental to the plot and we didn’t get to see many glimpses of scantily clad teenage girls doing hot dance routines (the main attraction of cheerleader movies on Lifetime -- as I’ve pointed out before, the words “cheerleader” and “sorority” are buzzwords Lifetime uses in their periodic attempts to get straight men to watch their channel). From the previews I had expected Cheerleader Abduction to be a sort of modern-dress version of The Great Lie (the 1941 Warner Bros. tearjerker in which Bette Davis and Mary Astor are romantic rivals for George Brent: Astor gets Brent to marry her but he almost immediately has the marriage annulled so he can marry Davis -- only in the meantime Astor got pregnant with Brent’s child and so she and Davis, who naturally can’t stand each other, have to live together in a desert hideaway for several months until the baby is born so they can pass it off as Davis’s; unlike other women who worked with Bette Davis, Mary Astor had nothing but good to say about the experience, claiming that Davis had asked the director to do retakes to favor Astor and get a stronger performance out of her, with the result that Astor won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award), but instead it turned out to be the old chestnut about the teenage girl who gets pregnant (by a boy she tricked with at a party and otherwise can’t stand -- yes, once again we have what David O. Selznick famously ridiculed as “infallible pregnancies at a single contact”) and gets recruited by a sinister “pregnancy counselor” who’s really running an underground adoption agency trafficking in black-market babies.

Alas, this is one Lifetime movie (produced by Lifetime Pictures in association with Robbins Entertainment and MarVista Entertainment) that has somehow escaped the notice of imdb.com, and the online source I was able to find gives only two actors’ names associated with their characters: Jerni Stewart as the heroine (sort of), Olivia Patton, and Kristen Harris as her mom Trish Patton. The family also includes a husband, Douglas -- who’s sort of a milquetoast character who works from home as a designer while Trish is mayor of the small town of Danforth, Michigan where the story takes place and she’s running in a Democratic primary for governor. (Judging from the experience of the current Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who’s been savagely attacked by President Trump over her aggressive response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and was the subject of an alleged plot by 13 white supremacists to kidnap her, give her a rump “trial” and possibly kill her, I wanted to take Trish aside and warn her that being a Democratic woman governor of Michigan isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.) There’s also one other kid in the Patton family, Olivia’s younger brother Aiden.

The gimmick is that almost as soon as Olivia finds out she’s pregnant and the guy who made her that way, Blake, rudely puts her off and basically says, “Not my problem,” she runs into the villain of the piece, Pamela Fairlane. I wish I knew the name of the actress playing this part because she’s the best performer in the movie; she’s middle-aged, rather dumpy-looking and butch enough with her short haircut that the friend with whom I was watching this thought she was supposed to be playing a Lesbian. (Actually it seems these days as if a lot of women are adopting the androgynous look, cutting their hair short and wearing bras that mash their tits down instead of showing them off -- and with so many people wearing face masks during the pandemic and thereby concealing whether or not they have facial hair, it’s getting harder to tell men and women apart when you see them on the street. The Black cheerleader coach in this movie is tall, slender, has her hair cut very short and has so little in the breast department that at first I wondered if she was a guy.) Whoever the actress playing Pamela is, she turns in a remarkable performance, managing to suggest the character’s ability to pose as sweetness and light as well as the evil underneath.

That’s a good thing because, while Kristen Harris turns in a performance of power and authority as the concerned mother torn between advancing her political career and protecting her daughter, Jerni Stewart is a total drip. She’s unable to bring any reality to the character’s conflicts and she goes through the whole movie with a fixed expression of mild annoyance at all the issues Jessica Landry’s script throws at her, from getting morning sickness while riding with the family in their car to attempting to register horror when she realizes that Pamela has essentially kidnapped her to grab and sell her baby. Michelle Ouillet is the director, and she turns in a decent job given the limitations of both the script and her leading actress -- the suspense as Pamela takes Olivia to a seedy motel to have her kjd (with the assistance of a barely competent doctor who walks out in the middle of the procedure, saying that Pamela isn’t paying him enough to risk losing his medical license over this) and Trish blows off an all-important TV candidates’ debate to give chase and rescue her daughter is genuinely exciting and convincing -- but for the most part Cheerleader Abduction is a pretty standard Lifetime movie with little to recommend it aside from a nice performance from the villain and good work from Kristen Harris.

I found the ending pretty preposterous: it takes place seven months after the main action and tells us that, despite blowing off the big TV primary debate to rescue her daughter, Trish won not only the primary but the general election for governor (so she can get nasty tweets from President Trump and death threats from white supremacists!) despite blowing off the debate -- it would have worked better dramatically if Trish had dropped out of the governor’s race because she realized she had got so wrapped up in her political career she neglected her family and put her daughter in mortal danger -- and Olivia is once again working a game as a cheerleader as Trish walks in as part of the audience, pushing a baby stroller obviously containing her grandchild (whose sex we never learn, by the way, though Olivia had at least two ultrasounds taken during her pregnancy). But then that’s a piece with a story one of whose plot gimmicks is that Pamela told Olivia not to tell anybody, especially her parents, that she was knocked up -- the only person Olivia confides in is Ashley, a Black girl who’s her best friend on the cheerleading squad (ya remember the cheerleading squad?) -- making this, like so many other movies (including a lot of the Astaire-Rogers musicals, in which the lies led to mistaken-identity gimmicks that were at least genuinely funny), one in which the plot complications would evaporate almost instantly as soon as any one character told any of the other characters the truth.