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LMN’s ‘Stranger Danger’ continues with a new thriller that is probably the most unintentionally campy things they’ve put on the air in some time. Be aware that there will be plot spoilers if you have yet to watch the movie.
She Wants My Daughter is centered around a woman, Claire, who runs a charitable foundation. She’s in a six month relationship with a man named Marcus, and she has an adopted daughter named Jenna, who is nox 16-years-old and curious to learn more about her biological parents. Claire thinks this is a subject they need to discuss before Jenna goes diving into things, which upsets Jenna, and when Marcus questions Claire’s decision, she tells him she’s heard stories about the mother involving substance abuse and crime so she isn’t sure she wants that brought into their lives. Well, it doesn’t matter because Jenna seems to have gone behind her mother’s back and submitted a request for the adoption paperwork — perhaps with Marcus’ helps as he’s being a bit cagey about it — and learns that her birth mother’s name is Sara and she wants to meet her ASAP. Claire is a firm no … and isn’t even sure if Jenna’s biological mother’s name is Sara. Meanwhile, Claire has work to focus on and learns that one of her foundation’s clients has not been receiving their grant money for … six months. Hmmmm. When she looks into it, the foundation’s comptroller Kara is nowhere to be found (a prologue shows Kara desperately trying to get the bank to transfer a million dollars to another account but when she poses as Claire, she doesn’t have the information to confirm her identity and the transfer is turned down as possible fraud, and someone in the room with Kara is not happy with how things have turned out so toodles Kara). Claire asks another co-worker to look over the financials and she discovers several unauthorized transfers totally millions of dollars. Claire asks private investigator Lenny to see if he can locate Kara so they can figure out what is going on.
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In the midst of all that drama, Claire gets an unexpected visitor at her home — Sara. Claire is stunned that she would just show up at their house, and is wondering how she even got the address, while Sara claims it was Jenna who called her and invited her to visit. And at just that moment, Jenna arrives home from school and without a moment’s hesitation assumes this woman at the door is her mother (yeah, it does not make sense since Jenna has never seen Sara and later tells Claire she did not call her … which Claire refuses to believe, instead accusing Jenna of now being a pathological liar). Regardless of how Claire feels, Jenna invites Sara in, and when Marcus gets home from work he is confused as to why Claire is setting so many places at the dinner table. Surprise! They have an unexpected guest who has decided to take a tour of the upstairs, it seems. Claire catches Sara in her study and notices some important papers have been moved around, which only raises more suspicions. Dinner is awkward, and before dessert can be served, Jenna suggests Sara say with with that night since she is currently living in a group home. Claire has no choice but to extend the invitation and Sara just happens to have her suitcase with her (where it’s been since she first arrived is unknown — in the bushes? — but she says she never leaves her stuff at the group home because things go missing). TO assure Claire she’s not a threat, Sara shows Claire her five years sober token and is adamant that all she wants is to get to know her daughter. But she continues to rile up Claire by trying to get Jenna to skip school and just enjoy being a teenager. At one point they even sneak off to a concert (both Jenna and Sara like the same band, and Sara even has personal connections to the band so she snags some great tickets), and Claire catches Sara sneaking out of the house at 3:00 AM (yeah, Sara seems to have become more than an overnight guest).
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But things begin to escalate when Lenny delivers the news to Claire that Kara is dead, and she appears to have been working with someone else. Claire is growing more concerned about all this happening since Sara arrived — again, she knows it started six months ago — and asks Lenny to do her the personal favor of also looking into Sara’s past. Marcus thinks it’s completely unreasonable to ask a company employee to do some personal work for her, but Claire and Lenny have been friends for a long time so it’s not a big deal. During his digging, Lenny keeps giving Claire vague information that Sara might be involved in the theft at the foundation … but she may not be too. All he does is just make Claire more certain — without any proof — that Sara is involved. Lenny manages to locate the man with whom Kara was working but … he’s dead. In the man’s house, Lenny is confronted by another figure holding a gun, to whom Lenny says he was always suspicious of them and he seems to be quickly drawing his own gun. Claire then gets a call from Lenny, or rather Lenny’s phone, from a very perturbed Detective Russo grilling Claire on her relationship with Lenny … who is dead, and whom the detective and others on the police force knew well so they are pissed that he’s dead and Russo is taking it all out on Claire. Claire panics and calls Jenna and tells her to come right home after school — although she can only reach her voice mail. The same with Marcus. The detective is also supposed to pay a visit to get an official statement. Claire then gets a text message with a picture of Jenna bound and gagged, ordering Claire to wire the kidnapper $10 million or else. When Marcus arrives home he is confused by everything going on but then suggests that Claire should just go ahead and make the transfer. Then he whacks her in the head with a candlestick. Claire wakes up and finds herself bound and gagged to a chair with Jenna in a chair to her back. Turns out it was all Marcus, who isn’t really Marcus, and Claire hasn’t recognized him — because of his ridiculous moustache — as a man who had come to her foundation three years earlier with a plan for providing clean drinking water to people around the world in need. Claire still doesn’t remember, but ‘Marcus’ tells her he was turned down because his proposal didn’t meet with the foundation’s mission statement and as a result, he lost everything, and his wife took the kids and left him. So he waited two-and-a-half years to hatch this plan and he’s bewildered that Claire never recognized him. He also tosses off the news that Sara was just a pawn, he called her pretending to be Jenna (how, we don’t know), and that she will not be able to answer her phone as cell service is spotty six feet under. But Claire manages to get Jenna untied and instead of running out of the house, she runs upstairs to hide in a closet. She may be a whiz in her special classes, but her sense of self-preservation needs some work. Any rational person would have run to a neighbor’s house. But that just gives ‘Marcus’ time to look under beds and open closet doors, only to be surprised when zombie Sara shows up — well, perhaps Marcus just wasn’t thorough in checking to make sure she was dead before he buried her — and cracks his skull. Some time later, all is well, Claire’s foundation recovered most of the stolen money and things are back on track, and Sara is now a welcomed member of the family, given permission by Claire to take Jenna to her father’s grave in their hometown and then to Chicago to meet her biological grandparents. The end.
She Wants My Daughter is one of the most misleading titles an LMN movie has ever had. Of course it’s meant to throw you off and suspect Sara the entire time but it’s just a bit aggravating when the actual story has nothing to do with anyone wanting to take Claire’s daughter. The script by Guy Harry and Ian Niles, and direction by Niles, works at a frantic pace to make you believe Sara is more than shady. But it’s also frustrating at how irrational the characters act … or how completely over-the-top they behave. The tone is all over the place. Claire, who is supposed to be a savvy businesswoman, just grows increasingly hysterical about Sara, never once putting two-and-two together that the embezzlement started right after she shacked up with Marcus. She seriously believes this woman, who they never met or even knew about, who shows up out of the blue has somehow been working with a trusted employee to steal millions of dollars. She also instantly turns on her daughter, who says several times that she did not contact Sara, refusing to believe her. And she never questions some of Marcus’ odd behavior. The writers have zero respect for the Claire character. Not helping thing is the directorial guidance — if there was any — from Ian Niles (Niles has more acting credits under his belt, and has collaborated with Harry on a handful of previous projects).
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Both Alison Chace and Justin C. Schilling are ridiculously over-the-top at the start of the movie, making their performances feel more like something out of a cheesy 1970s TV commercial or maybe even a 1950s sitcom. The way they talk and gesture is completely unrealistic. Chace does occasionally become more focused and dramatic, but she’s always undone by the writing and directing that just pushes her performance way into parody territory. Schilling’s Marcus is just a parody of a Ward Cleaver type from the first frame. And his hair! WTF is going on with his hair? He goes to work as if he just rolled out of bed, but then goes to bed with a perfectly combed and set ‘do. His hair is so distracting and whoever was responsible for that look should not be allowed to work in the hairstyling industry every again. I’ve seen better work from the local barber school. Schilling then just goes completely off the rails when he reveals to Claire that it’s all been his doing, pointing out how stupid she was for being fooled by his moustache, like it was Superman’s Clark Kent glasses, baffled as to how anyone could fall for that (good point). Also, whoever on the team of Harry and Niles that came up with Marcus’s pet name for Claire, ‘Claire Bear’, should be reprimanded. Perhaps once or twice in the early ‘happy family’ scenes at the start of the movie was cute, but he did it throughout the movie and in the most inappropriate moments, like when Claire and Lenny are discussing the embezzlement and Sara. He deserved that hammer to the head much earlier, and from Claire instead of Sara. Neither of these performances make me eager to see either actor in another project (LMN could have gone the safe route and cast regular Alana Hawley Purvis as Claire, because she knows how to turn dreck into something compelling).
Leann Gardner actually manages to give a pretty solid performance as a teen girl trying to respect her mother but on the edge of being rebellious, especially when Sara arrives. Jordan Lane Price has moments where she gives Sara an authenticity, but the character is written as being way too snotty when she arrives, and it’s more than likely that Niles directed Price to play her exactly like that. It perhaps would have worked better if Sara didn’t come in guns blazing simply to justify the film’s title. There is one hilarious line for Sara that had me on the floor. Not long before she makes a quip about the obvious age difference between Claire and Marcus, I had mentioned that she looked at least fifteen years older than him (not that there’s anything wrong with that but there was no context as to why there was an age difference, but it did afford Sara the funniest moment in the movie). In the end, Gardner and Price give the best performances in the movie. T.L. Flint as Lenny — is that his real voice? — is fine, but again, the performance is undone by the writing which makes him confounding when giving Claire information about Sara. He has nothing on her, but feels she could be involved, although she also may not be involved. Thanks, Sherlock. How about just not say anything until you know for sure. And when he sees who is in the house with him — of course it’s Marcus — and says he always thought he was up to no good, though he never demonstrated any suspicions when he was around Claire and Marcus — his reaction makes little sense (especially since we’re probably supposed to believe it’s Sara holding a gun on him). As for Jamie Ragusa as Detective Russo — what crawled up her butt? She is hostile from the second she gets Sara on the phone … and you assume it would be she who arrives at the house for that statement and saves the day … although she probably would have killed Claire, still angry about Lenny’s death and his connection to Claire.
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She Wants My Daughter just verges on the edge of high camp, falling short though in the same way that Lifetime’s 2015 A Deadly Adoption, with Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig, did when it should have been a complete parody of the typical Lifetime movies. Guy Harry, with just three previous credits to his name … all of which were comedies, should have leaned into the ridiculousness of the plot and went full-on parody. Perhaps Niles had some influence over the script, reining it in, or the network forbid them from making a mockery of their usual output … but perhaps it is time for LMN to lighten up a bit and mix in the occasional ‘this movie is so dumb it has to be funny’ mind-set. As it stands, the only thing a viewer can do to make the movie more enjoyable is to make a drinking game out Marcus’ ‘Claire Bear’ mentions. You’ll be passed out before the halfway point … which is a good thing.
She Wants My Daughter has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.