Drew Peterson: Untouchable (2012)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
In today's age where people are convicted by the media before there's even a trial, Lifetime comes out with this film, which aired just before the real trial of Drew Peterson (Rob Lowe) started. In the film we see his relationship with his fourth wife Stacy (Kaley Cuoco), which starts out great but slowly falls apart and things get media attention when she goes missing under mysterious circumstances. You know, it would be incredibly easy to sit here and bash the heck out of this movie because for a "drama" there were certainly many unintentional funny things here. However, I guess if you go to a Drive-In trash flick you know not to expect a masterpiece so perhaps watching Lifetime TV movies like this one you should just expect silly things. As far as TV movies go, this here really isn't too bad as it at least gets the main job done, which is that it's never boring and it does keep your attention from start to finish. As someone fairly familiar with the original media outburst, the film managed to have some nice suspense sprinkled throughout and this is especially true towards the end once the net around Peterson started to get tighter. Lowe does a pretty good job with his performance as he manages to make you understand why these young girls would fall for him but he's also good showing why they'd be afraid of him. Cuoco is also good as the fourth wife and we get some nice support from Catherine Dent as her neighbor and James Karen as a priest. As I said, there's quite a bit of stuff here that comes off with unintentional laughs including a sequence where Drew catches his wife having dinner with an old friend. Other issues with the film include what every TV movie does and that's make everything over-dramatic to the point that it nearly reaches camp. Still, for a TV movie this is worth watching if you're into this type of thing.
