On occasion, even the big mega-buck films, with A-list stars and 9-figure budgets, have to contain ridiculously silly omissions to further the plot.
But it seems that these "Lifetime," stories, with far from A-list-staffed personnel, do this about 95% of the time.
Here, about a hundred or so words of clarification and conversation between the two leads could have precluded all of this nonsense. Of course, then the contact between Laura and her sociopathic former classmate would have been precluded, and the story would have ended after 15 minutes or so. Incidentally, if this had occurred, and they would have just shown a test pattern for the last 100 minutes, it would have been about as entertaining.
Russell is a hard-working ad executive/husband, and wife Jessica feels he's cheating from things she has heard, from her stilted observations, and inferences drawn from his erratic, often late work schedule.
But for cripes sake, a one-minute conversation between them, and the fore-mentioned 100 words, could have informed her of the fact that he was on the verge of concluding a deal which would have them all set for life, necessitating long hours and occasioning dining with an attractive woman (about which she'd heard from one of her equally-shallow friends).
Even this vacuous woman should have understood that. Hubby could have offered a few words of explanation of his own volition, but frankly, the hot -shot ad exec pretty much matched her in the "vacuous" department.
So enter the sociopathic former classmate, and his equally (or more) sociopathic companion, and you now have twice the number of vacuous personages on-screen, a story which a challenged 12-year-old could predict, and a whole slew of characters about whom one couldn't care less.
(Incidentally, after Jessica initially meets Marcus, and he - purporting to be a big-deal real estate mogul, invites her to dinner - where she chortles about this upcoming assignation with her friends, the dialog here is something which would make the conversations among the nerdy teens in the old beach blanket flicks seem like something highly-intellectual by comparison. And the inevitable brandishing of various weaponry at the conclusion could have been culled from any number of Lifetime "sociopath-menaces-innocent-family" past presentations.)
