Country Justice

I loved this movie, and really want to see it aired again...I hope it will be in the near future. Rachel Leigh Cook was excellent and it tackled a very difficult subject. I'd love to see it again.

Mediocre movie of the week about a young girl who goes to visit her long lost mother and winds up getting caught in the web of an unstable stranger. This meeting leads to much sorrow for not only the girl but her only other living relative, her grandfather, who winds up in dutch with the state police. Ally Sheedy played, and looked, the part of a burnt out drunk with nothing to live for. Interesting enough story but not very believable and way too corny for my tastes.

The premise of Country Justice (also titled Family Rescue) is easy enough to predict, but the second half completely derails and takes you on a wild wide. At the start, young mother Ally Sheedy abandons her daughter so she can live a more reckless and selfish life. She leaves her baby with her father, George C. Scott, and takes off. Fifteen years later, Rachael Leigh Cook is curious about her mother, even though she loves and respects her grandfather. On a whim, she buys a bus ticket and leaves George a note, but when Ally isn't glad to see her, she's very disheartened. Ally's boyfriend, Don Diamont, is very attentive to Rachael - too attentive. So, yes, it's easy to guess what happens next.

Parts of Country Justice have the potential to really affect the audience, but most of it felt like a cheap tv movie - which happened to get George C. Scott to play the lead. I liked him as the steady grandfather who puts his family first no matter the cost, and it was interesting to see Mary Anne from The Babysitter's Club going through such a dramatic ordeal. But much of the plot was very far fetched. You're going to have to really be in the mood for a melodramatic tv flick to get engrossed in this one.

Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. It doesn't go into detail, but there is a rape scene involving a teenager, so I wouldn't let my kids watch it.

A very sensitive topic--15 y/o girl abandoned by mother as a baby and who goes to visit her, continues to be ignored, is raped by her mom's boyfriend, becomes pregnant. There was not enough depth displayed of this situation. Too much of time is taken up on the chase with the truckers transporting the baby. (Interesting, this baby with asthma--you never see him cry-- except once--, be fed, have is diaper changed during the whole truck transport ordeal.) I would have liked to have seen more of the interrelationships, more focus on the fact that this girl was a minor--this should have stood up in court immediately.

And this was a true story! It deserved a better telling than that!!

If it weren't for the subject matter, I would have given this closer to a 0 rating. I rented this from the library. Only later I found out it was a made for TV movie.

oh well

CBS-TV movie has George C. Scott playing grandpa to teen-granddaughter Rachael Leigh Cook's illegitimate baby, who was born with asthma. When medical insurance proves to be a problem, Scott proposes that he legally adopt the child, alerting the baby's father who had "forced himself" on the girl. Unbelievable drama "inspired by true events" works hard to tie up its story with a big tidy bow, but only the gullible will swallow this stuff. Cook gives a good performance despite a 'plaintive' voiceover narration designed to weaken us at the knees, while Scott gets to be both loving and surly--a big bear of a man fighting for the justice of an infant who in turn has an entire town fighting for him. *1/2 from ****