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It’s May and that means Mother’s Day is right around the corner, so to celebrate moms all month long, LMN is launching its ‘Revenge is a Mother’ series of films … just so you don’t get confused and think this is the Hallmark Channel. First up is the luridly titled Snatched from the Crib, which implies a home invasion and a babynapping. Only part of that statement is true.
Snatched from the Crib opens with a very pregnant Eliza leaving a voice mail for her stepsister Gabi, who is in Paris. Eliza leaves her house and arrives at what looks to be a fancy cabin in the woods … and she is promptly abducted. Gabi comes home two weeks later after not hearing from her sister and begins to think something isn’t right, especially after she visits Eliza’s office and talks to her bosses … who had no idea Gabi existed. We have to assume boss lady Kate thought Eliza was on maternity leave since she didn’t seem concerned that her employee had not been to work in two weeks, but the other boss, Aiden, is acting all kinds of suspicious when Gabi keeps asking questions. So suspicious that you immediately think ‘he’s the father’. Gabi does have a longer talk with Kate later, and then back at Eliza’s house she finds an intruder … but it’s just Eliza’s ex Jared rooting around for clues. Gabi gets a call from the police — good news, they’ve found Eliza. Bad news — they found Eliza’s body, and the baby is missing. This must mean someone killed Eliza and took her baby (so not a home invasion and there was no crib involved), but who?

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Gabi puts on her private eye hat and begins digging for clues, remembering that Eliza would not tell her the father’s name, only calling him Blue. Just so happens there’s a bar in town with Blue in the name so Gabi starts there, first asking a server if he recognizes Eliza’s picture, he doesn’t, and notices the bartender, Marcus, looking panicked as he runs out the back door. She follows and he tells her he does remember Eliza and that she met up with a man there, but he doesn’t want to get involved in anything that could bring attention to him (we later learn why). With a little more info, Gabi returns to the house and Jared is there again, but before she can dismiss him a car comes out of nowhere straight for Gabi. Jared pushes her out of the way and is hit. But is he dead or alive? (We only find out later that he’s in critical condition in the hospital.) Kate offers to pay for a real PI to dig up information, a contact of her husband Jake. Side bar: Kate and Aiden are exes, Jake is the new, extremely jealous husband who also acts very suss. Gabi, though, is directed to check out an adoption agency which has a shady reputation, but she’s met with hostility by the owner Abigail. Gabi is pretending to be a potential adopter, and Abigail tells her there’s a lot of information to read first as she hands her a trifold flyer which Gabi could have read in 90 seconds standing right there. Abigail also tells her to fill out the online form because she is not helping her right then and there. Nothing odd about that at all. Cutting to the chase — the movie goes completely off the rails when Marcus picks the lock at the adoption agency so Gabi can steal some records, they later confront Abigail and find a baby and without any formal introductions Abigail seems to know Gabi is Eliza’s sister and that baby is hers, and the actual father is revealed at what was supposed to be a team building retreat for the company at the same cabin where Eliza was abducted (which was owned by Kate and Aiden before they broke up and is now used for company functions and rentals, perhaps. The whole thing is rather convoluted.
Snatched from the Crib feels a bit disjointed at times, especially near the end, prompting one to ask, ‘Was this written by ChatGPT?’ It’s like the writer, Melissa Cassera, plugged a bunch of characters and situations into the program and this script is what it regurgitated. Or perhaps Cassera just couldn’t come up with a satisfying ending and needed some AI assist because that’s when it really gets unhinged and some if it makes little sense, like how did Abigail know that Gabi was looking for Eliza’s baby? How did she know Gabi was Eliza’s sister? That was a head-scratching moment. Also the choices made by director Patricia Frontain and actor Ali Amin Carter to make Aiden so obviously guilty is so cliché at this point in time. At least in this case Gabi is allowed to recognize his behavior, where in most of these movies only the audience is supposed to be in on the secret. Can someone just write a movie where everyone acts normal and when their guilt is revealed at the end the audience is truly surprised?!? Aiden is also given some suspicious behavior to draw all the attention to him so that when the baby daddy reveal happens, we’re supposed to gasp. This viewer figured it out before the movie gets to that point. The fact is, the story starts out decently enough — although there is never any reason given for Eliza’s odd behavior in that no one knew about Gabi — there are a couple of okay red herrings (like the office co-worker who seems to know a lot but prefers to talk in cryptic riddles), but the last few scenes leading to the climax are somehow both frustratingly absurd and wildly entertaining (although more in an unintentionally funny way). Snatched from the Crib is in no way a great movie and it’s not the worst LMN has ever put on the air (and why did they just drop this onto the schedule the day it aired?), but it treads a fine line.

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What helps the movie are (some) of the performances. As mentioned, Carter loses some points for being so obviously suspicious (and for that matter, so does Joe Kurak as Jake). Anna Marie Dobbins really carries the film as Gabi, generating sympathy and empathy from the audience, firmly putting us on her side to find out what happened to her stepsister and the baby (and in one extremely realistic bit of writing, Gabi admits that she is in no position to adopt her sister’s baby because you just assume she will take the child … although where the baby ends up is a bit eye-rolling). Dobbins is just totally believable throughout the movie and that helps us forgive some of the more egregious situations that require a total suspension of disbelief. Aiding her is Derek McDonnell as Marcus. At times he’s written frustratingly vague — like how he always insists he doesn’t want to be involved in any potential lawbreaking adventures … and then shows up at the adoption agency with a set of professional lock picks (which then explains his aversion to the police) — but he has wonderful chemistry with Dobbins to the point that if this were a Hallmark movie, you know they’d end up together at the end (and perhaps they do). Dobbins and McDonnell are the wheels that keep this movie rolling, totally engaging the audience and investing us in their quest for the truth.
Brittney Q. Hill is fine as Kate, although you are never sure if she knows more than she’s letting on. Rachael Sorensen as Detective Jennings brings a lot of professionalism to the character and is never condescending to Gabi, even when she is pestering the detective for more information than she currently has. Rachael Murphy’s Abigail is unnecessarily terse with Gabi at first, and Tom Dacey Carr’s character, identified as Brent Foster (Abigail’s husband, brother?), is never really fleshed out. Christian Blaque Meier does a good job as Jared and until his unfortunate accident almost seems like he will be the one working with Gabi to solve the mystery of Eliza’s disappearance. Ella Frazee plays Eliza in the flashbacks, but she’s just written to be either upset about her situation or frustratingly vague.
Snatched from the Crib, despite its misleading title, is entertaining enough if you happen to stumble across it sometime. It might be even more entertaining at a Girls Night with a couple of glasses of wine.
Snatched from the Crib has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-PG.