Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story

The acting is truly awful, as for the one playing Ming, please go back to drama school, a lump of cardboard would have acted better.

This true story deserved a lot better actors to tell it.

You have to wonder about the people who are around you when you consider true crime. Mary Stauffer was not a woman who one would consider to be living a high risk lifestyle yet she and her daughter were abducted.

The film is fairly tame considering what they actually went through. Lifetime has a way of filming some pretty horrific crimes committed against woman in ways that are respectful towards victims and that is appreciated by a lot of women.

I would suggest this. It was well acted and a decent watch for a night on the couch.

In 1980, school teacher Mary Stauffer (Alyson Hannigan) and her eight-year old daughter Beth are kidnapped by her former student Ming Sen Shiue. They are held captive for 53 days. It's a straight forward Lifetime woman-in-trouble movie. Alyson is good. Most of the actors are fine. Everything is fine and nothing's great.

Over the top tamed down version of events. Made for tv event, really.

These true stories SHOULD be treated as true stories and not some cleaned up version. It's a disservice.

I'll keep this short and sweet. The story here is very close to the actual happenings of the Mary Stauffer kidnapping, but because this was a film designed for a TV audience, including children, it spares many of the horrific accounts that actually took place.

Hannigan delivers above all in this movie to portray Mary, a role that is difficult to capture and required a lot of pressure to take on.

It's also an excellent testament to the power of hope and prayer. The morals that the world learned from the actual crime are easily pushed in a proper manner.