Movie Review :: Lifetime’s Kidnapped in a Small Town

Lifetime

Lifetime’s newest ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ entry, Kidnapped in a Small Town, has probably the most accurate title any Lifetime movie has ever had. It also comes with so many twists and turns and flashbacks and callback that it seems the actors may be just as confused by it all as much as the audience. That could also go a long way to explaining some of the truly bad acting.

Kidnapped in a Small Town stars Alicia Blasingame and Joesy De Palo as mother and daughter Sara and Ruby, respectively. Ruby is about to begin college, far away from her mother, so Sara decides to make a road trip out of it for the two of them, still trying to deal with the death of husband and father Michael (Gary Hood) in a tragic accident (Michael apparently slipped in a stream and hit his head on a rock). Sara and Ruby seem to have also weathered their own rocky relationship but are making the best of it during this trip. After stopping at a small convenience store, a creepy local pops out from in front of Sara’s parked car and tells her the oil is leaking and he can fix it. A bit spooked, she assures him she just had it serviced and the man walks away, seemingly insulted that she didn’t think he could help. Not far down the road … the car breaks down and in the middle of nowhere the is no cell service. A pickup truck similar to the one Sara saw parked outside the convenience store keeps racing up and down the road but does not stop. Finally a car stops and a woman named Allie gets out and offers them a ride. Sara is concerned about leaving the car alone with all of their stuff in it, but Ruby volunteers to go with Allie. Sara is a hard no, but Ruby convinces her that if Sara can’t trust her now, how can she trust her while she’s in another state at college. And she has the pepper spray Sara just gave her so everything will be fine.

Time passes and that pickup flies by once again, causing Sara to drop a picture of her family she’d been looking at. While retrieving it from under the car she notices something dangling, gets the two wires plugged back together and the car starts. She heads into the town of Shadyvale to meet up with Ruby and Allie at the local diner, but when she gets there Ruby is nowhere to be found and Allie claims she’s never laid eyes on Sara or her daughter. The sheriff happens by and tries to sort things out but no one in the diner will admit to seeing anyone with Allie. Sara doesn’t know what to do but one of the patrons finally does come to her to offer help in finding Ruby, but warning her that she can’t trust anyone in town not even the police, and to make sure no one follows Sara to the locations the woman, Jane, sends her to, Jane takes Sara’s car and gets Sara a rideshare … which drops her off at the wrong address. Things begin to get very convoluted as Sara is sent on one wild goose chase after another, the phone calls with Jane breaking up every time they speak, to the point that Sara begins to think that maybe she’s going crazy. And by that point the audience may feel the same way except … if you’re paying close attention to little clues like the fact that Sara and Ruby never met anyone from Michael’s family, coupled with some obvious acting that stands out like a neon arrow pointing to one character letting you know they are behind everything, well, it all begins to make sense … until it doesn’t.

And where do we assign the blame for all the contrivances? The writers certainly, Jesse Mittlestadt and Richard Switzer, who are trying to craft an Agatha Christie style mystery by way of Inception, dragging Sara from one location to the next, being mostly guided by the disembodied voice of Jane, and constantly crossing paths with various people from the diner, all acting really, really suspiciously. I mean really suspiciously. Now was this simply an acting choice on their parts, was this how the director, Mike Hoy, instructed them to act? None of them are behaving naturally which, of course, is meant to throw the viewer off the scent of the real kidnapper. You begin to wonder if this is going to turn out to be some kind of science fiction story by the end. Are the people of Shadyvale real people? Is Shadyvale even a real place? Is this all some kind of fantasy created in Sara’s mind to help her cope with her husband’s, and perhaps even her daughter’s deaths? Unfortunately, it’s not quite that clever. No, it’s all real, and as Sara finally finds Ruby and the kidnapper, all the pieces are helpfully put together with flashbacks just like an Agatha Christie movie (or Columbo and Poker Face). And, again, if you were paying attention earlier, it’s pretty easy to guess who the kidnapper is (the ‘why’ is a little more tricky because it involves the perspective of the kidnapper which we don’t get until they are revealed). Also, the actor playing the kidnapper is never convincing that they are simply trying to help Sara (really trying to dance around the identity without spoiling it, but if you’ve watched the movie, you get it). There is one part of the reveal that makes no sense, again because of the acting. Sara is finally told that despite what she believed, no one in the town was in on some grand plan to gaslight her. There were a couple though, but instead of behaving realistically, the entire cast acts like they are all part of a conspiracy constantly trying to assure Sara they are on her side. But they don’t, so again we have to ask is this the fault of the director or the actors … or both? That many people could not have come to the same conclusion on their own to act obviously shady. It would have been so much better if they were just normal people with just a hint of oddness to throw Sara and the audience off. At least during the scene where Sara ends up at Allie’s house and Allie offers her some tea, Sara bluntly sets the cup right back down on the table. No thank you, ma’am. Also, how the kidnapper managed to set up this entire plot, befriending Ruby on social media and getting her to reveal all of their travel plans … which just happened to bring them to Shadyvale … is a bit hard to swallow. Of course it is a cautionary tale for parents to police their kids’ online activity!

Perhaps the actors’ style in this film was brought about because they didn’t know what was going on. Maybe Hoy only gave them the pages of the scenes they were in. Blasingame’s performance can go from realistic to overly forced and hysterical back to subtle again. She’s made to feel like she is losing her mind and at times the performance is just too over-wrought, again making us think that perhaps none of this is real. The best, most natural performance comes from De Palo as Ruby. She’s not in the movie for a long stretch until almost the end, but her early scenes with Blasingame are authentic. She feels like a real teenager looking to get out from under her mother’s wing.

Chelsea Rose Cook is never convincing with any of her line readings. Cook did a nice job in the recent Secret Life of the Surgeon’s Wife, so her performance here makes it all the more obvious that the director is responsible for the ‘yeah, I am a really shady character in Shadyvale’ performances. Joe Gatton also falls prey to the ‘I’m completely in on this’ style of acting as the Sheriff, as do Dameion Dukes as landscaper Don, Clay Crump as Reggie (the weird guy outside the convenience store … but of course he’s involved), as well as the actors playing the older couple from the diner and the diner owner himself. Even characters not seemingly directly involved with the kidnapping are shady, which again makes you feel there is more to this than meets the eye, which there isn’t. I hate to rag on people doing their jobs, but none of them save for De Palo were very convincing. Did Hoy just film the rehearsals and use that footage for the film?

We’ll never know. Kidnapped in a Small Town is just one of those films where you have to keep asking what is going on. Actually now that I think about it, this is on par with one of M. Night Shyamalan’s lesser films where you just keep waiting for the twist and when it comes you aren’t all that surprised.

Kidnapped in a Small Town has a run time of 1 hour 28 minutes, and is rated TV-14.