My Daughter's Secret

After applying glossy color to her full lips, 17-year-old high school student Nina Dobrev (as Justine Douglas) meets her 21-year-old blond boyfriend Steve Byers (as Brent) and his wavy-haired brother James Gilbert (as Reggie) for a weird date. The two young men work as automobile mechanics. They rob the jewelry store where Ms. Dobrev's mother Jennifer Grant (as Denise) works as a manager. For some reason, Dobrev is immediately employed as the getaway car lookout, although she has just learned about the crime and acts like a flight risk. Turns out, she can be trusted to go along with the plan...

After the robbery, Ms. Grant frets about daughter Dobrev's increasing strange behavior. Grant is the real-life daughter of Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon. She should worry, because this TV Movie is incredibly dumb. Even worse is the level of responsibility the story allows the daughter to take for her participation in the crime. For what it's worth, Mr. Gilbert does well with his sleazy character and Catherine Mary Stewart is always an attractive police detective.

*** My Daughter's Secret (10/7/07) Douglas Jackson ~ Nina Dobrev, Jennifer Grant, Steve Byers, James Gilbert

I think it was, you can tell by the horrible everything and the even worse feeling you get when you watch it. It makes me sad that movies like this can make it onto an actual DVD. People are always complaining about the waste humans create in this day and age. They blame auto makers for giant SUV's, they blame Chuck Norris for leaving dead bodies everywhere, they also blame Rosie O'Donnell for constantly farting...but they should also blame people who make movies like this for wasting the plastic it took to make this disc. Also, this makes me wish the abortion age limit was raised. I think it should be set one year older than the director's current age. That way we can kill him and not feel horrible about it. Also, we should bring back the Riptide Rush flavor of Gatorade. That stuff was awesomeness in a bottle.

Young girl 'innocently' ends up playing look-out while her boyfriend and his psychotic brother rob the jewelry store where the girl's mom works; after an employee is shot and killed, the girl feels the shame of guilt at being involved, but obstinately shuns her caring mother (who acts like this is abnormal behavior for a teenage girl!). The kind of hopeless, hapless TV-movie wherein everybody on-camera has been cast in the hopes of reminding viewers of somebody else. Nina Dobrev looks a lot like Vanessa Hudgens or a younger Katie Holmes, Steve Byers looks like a blond Keanu Reeves (and has apparently studied Reeves' patented tics), while Catherine Mary Stewart could be filling in for Hillary Swank. Product such as this is ground out for bored couch-potatoes, uninterested really in whether or not the picture is a good one as long as it keeps them awake. There's a sympathetic performance by likable Norman Mikeal Berketa (who looks a bit like Jeffrey Tambor), and the all's-well-that-ends-well conclusion is good for an unintentional laugh.

This was pretty awful. No, it was unbearably awful. Bad acting on ALL counts, one- dimensional characters (at best), storyline weak, rush and unlikeable. I was in the mood for one of those terrible, made-for-Lifetime-movies; you know the type, with has-been actors, and transparent, weakly delivered plots, bad staging, poor dialogue... Meredith Baxter- Birney, Judith Light... the usual suspects. This was more-or-less like that, but disappointing, in that it wasn't even innocently cheesy. However, I kept thinking that the mom in this one (Jennifer Grant?) would have been better cast as Heidi Fleiss in a bio-pic of the madam's life. They have similar equine features, and can't act. Other than that, pfft.

While this film would almost certainly would have been mediocre regardless of casting, the actress (Jennifer Grant) who plays the mother's emotionless performance was so distracting that I couldn't focus on the rest of the movie. It's rather obvious that she's only getting work because she's the attractive daughter of a Hollywood legend. They may as well have casted a mannequin in the role -- they might have gotten a significantly more emotional performance if they had.

The plot itself is typical "daughter accidentally gets herself in trouble" fair. Aside from Statue-face, whose performance was abysmal, the actors were mediocre.