A Deadly Adoption (Rachel Lee Goldenberg)

[Henry Gale]

IMDb / Wiki

[D_Davis]

If this is anything like The Spoils of Babylon, I'd rather blow my brains out then watch a single second.

[Henry Gale]

It's a haunting, harrowing thriller containing career best from all those involved.

Truly a new benchmark for Lifetime, who're always already pushing the envelope.

Just a chilling, edge of your sofa drama. Well worth catching a rerun.

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Okay, so they decided to play it completely straight instead of going for the easy-target spoof of the network-specific sub-genre, and that makes this thing so much more bizarre and dream-like and effective on its own terms than played than if they'd done a straight-up farce with it. It's just such a niche idea done so dryly, I'm not sure how much anyone not entirely "in" on the joke or particularly stirred by its irony will make of it.

I almost really did forget what I was watching at certain points, because Ferrell and Wiig commit exactly to the extent any actor (of arguable range) would with such material, which then makes all the insane twists, wooden stylistic flourishes and hysterical dialogue play even more stealthily. The direction, done by a frequent contributor to The Asylum's horrible output, but also is involved with Funny or Die, had to know what she was getting into, but decides to also play it completely like a bad movie that believes it works brilliantly rather than a knowing comedy that's above it all.

Only once it finished with its "Inspired by true events" title card after the insanely long kitchen dance party ending did it all start to hit me as to what I had just seen, and just parts were as covertly hilarious as they were. It's like an 85-minute hypnotism that attempts to put you in the mindset of those that actually watch these movies every week, with the casting of the leads and Andre Steele's script as the trojan horse that never quite opens up the way you'd expect.

The debate with this could go on for a while as to whether or not it should've have overt in its absurdist comedic skewering of the clunky staples of the network's factory-assembled "high-drama" filmmaking, but under those terms, it probably would've never been able to air as it did. The original plan was for it to have no publicity or trade announcements and simply find its way on the air Saturday night (seemingly the usual time movies like it premiere) and maybe that would've been the best thing for it instead of the build-up it got, allowing everyone to let their mind race about what it was going to be like before it, instead of seeing what it really was: A Lifetime movie that just happens to star Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig. And maybe under the terms it did get released it ended up feeling like a missed opportunity that may never get discussed beyond this week, as another funny-on-paper-but-not-in-practice Ferrell experiment (like Casa De Mi Padre before it) but the fact that it's so defiantly not littered with jokes and obviously spoofy gags is exactly why I think it was great the way it was made. But a part of me still wants the broad parody.

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