Made for cable television, this primer in paranoia provides the viewer with a few well-spun plot twists before it succumbs to third-act fatigue.
Exercise instructor Jane (Shanna Reed) gets a divorce from husband Bonner (Terry O'Quinn), an alcoholic cop. She also wins custody of their son Eric (Keegan Macintosh). Straightaway, the heroine is wooed and won by Patrick (Pierce Brosnan), her soulful gym partner who gets along great with Eric.
But Bonner's obsessed spying and harassment compell the family to leave for California. Jane and Eric go on ahead, through a succession of dingy motels and bleak highways, where more than one car seems to be following them and perfect strangers stalk the boy. When Eric vanishes, local lawmen give
Jane's frantic report little credence. They appear to be covering for brother officer Bonner; meanwhile, Jane can't locate Patrick.
When Bonner does appear, he brings the double revelation that Patrick has done prison time and that Eric isn't really Jane's biological child but a junkie's kid Bonner switched at birth in the hospital when his wife's baby was stillborn. When all the masks come off, Patrick is Eric's real father,
a heartless wastrel who only pretended to love Jane so he could steal the child back and sell him to wealthy relatives. The cad has no qualms about killing Jane, but Bonner shoots him down instead.
The ingratiating Brosnan (who made his debut as 007 in GOLDENEYE the same year this arrived on home video) previously scored as a ruthless KGB assassin in THE FOURTH PROTOCOL, but here his attempt at a gleefully deceitful villainy a la George Sanders seems glib and forced. The story rebounds
nicely off the midstream surprise about Eric's illicit parentage, a plot twist which serves to explain Bonner's lingering resentment, if not Jane's often dim powers of perception. Styled to look like G. Gordon Liddy and quietly reprising his dad-from-hell persona from THE STEPFATHER, O'Quinn is
the sharpest thing about the picture. Oppressive, overcast settings and an all-permeating sense of mistrust lend DON'T TALK TO STRANGERS a noir-ish atmosphere, but over the long haul the picture doesn't rise to it. (Violence, adult situations, substance abuse.) leave a comment