Every now and again, a movie is made in which you don't know if the filmmakers are serious or if it's a subtle parody of a genre. Look at movies like Stephen King's Silver Bullet and Starship Troopers. You're not sure if they were intentionally made to be bad, or meant as comedies but marketed as serious, or poorly made serious dramas.
A Deadly Adoption is so bad of a movie, it's good at being bad. It stars Will Ferrell, sporting a beard and wearing plain light blue and cream buttoned down shirts, as Robert Benson, a popular financial adviser writer and Kristen Wiig as his wife, Sarah, an owner/operator of her own organic gluten-free food supply or whatever. It doesn't matter. They are so plain and borderline parody, you're waiting for a joke to emerge and it never does and that's what is both good and bad about the movie.
Released on June 20 on Lifetime Movie Network, it's a love letter to those awful movies that have been staples on the channel for many years.
It starts off with Wiig's character suffering a near-fatal fall. She fell off a dock while pregnant and the trauma led to the death of the unborn child. Ferrell's character throws a "Get off the dock," line that is similar to his "Get off the shed!" skit in one of his earliest and most awful Saturday Night Live sketches.
Flash forward 5 years later and the family is living well in a suburban town and they decide to have another child. Apparently, Wiig's character can't have any more kids, so they quickly look to adopt a baby. Enter the Jessica Lowndes as Bridgette, a young pregnant mother, who Robert and Sarah immediately take in after talking with her after being introduced through an agency. Little by little, Bridgette isn't what she seems especially after a shady character, Dwayne, played by broody Jake Weary who proves that having a goatee means you're a bad guy in movies.
Eventually, we learn something about Robert and Bridgette, who have a history together and there's more to her pregnancy. There's the friend/co-worker of Sarah's who is the first to suspect something is amiss and the first, of course, to meet an unfortunate end.
The movie does fall apart at the end, but I think it's meant to. Most of these LMN movies are poorly scripted and paced and after an hour or so of watching the show, you wander why they just don't wrap things up, but there's still a lingering third act in which people just show up as if they have a sixth sense of where people will be.
A Deadly Adoption got a little bit of buzz on April 1 after it was revealed Ferrell and Wiig were pulling out of production because the TV movie had been leaked. Don't know if it was an elaborate joke or they were serious and reconsidered, but don't care.
You don't have to see a LMN or any other movie to understand what is being mocked here. Part of the problem with parodies now, like those made by Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, is the filmmakers are taking too much time to explain to you what they're making fun of and why. Movies like Blazing Saddles and Airplane! presented themselves as part of their genres they were mocking first and then decided to let the jokes in.
It's hard to rate A Deadly Adoption. It's terrible and the dialogue is awful. You can guess the plot twists 10 minutes before they happen, but that is the goal, I think. This is a movie that wants you not to like it and in a way, we do, even though we don't.
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