My Daughter's Secret

The movie is all about the terrible female angst of the lead character, who was implicated in a robbery/homicide by her lowlife boyfriend. But if you ever watched a cop show in your life, you know that the moment she didn't get out of that car and run and call the cops, she was an accomplice. And every day that she continues to cover up her boyfriend's guilt, she is an accomplice after the fact. She's an amoral criminal and I don't see how anyone can possibly feel sorry for her or be concerned about her "plight." Legally she is as responsible for the murder as the guy who pulled the trigger.

Anyway I'm sitting here watching it, so what's that say about me :-)

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.

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

A 17 year old girl inadvertently gets mixed up in a robbery planned by her boyfriend on the store her mother works in.

This lifetime movie isn't ground breaking but it's surprisingly watchable thanks to a good cast and good dialog.

Jennifer Grant as the mother is quite good.

The lovely pre Vampire Diaries Nina Dobrev takes a role that could have been annoying and makes her quite sympathetic especially when she does some irritating things.

It has a lesson about consequences about having the wrong boyfriend. Listen to your Moms girls!

Worth a watch.

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.