Tag: TVM

Banshee

  By

★★
“Blows a cylinder”

This one is slightly unusual among action-heroine films, in that it was both written and directed by women: Kirsten Elms and Kari Skogland respectively. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly an advert for their gender; after a brisk start, it falls apart, and becomes a ridiculously implausible movie, in a completely different genre from where it started. That’s a real pity, because where it started, had a lot more potential than where it ends up. It begins with Sage Rion (Manning), a young but highly-talented thief, taking a bet with her partner, as to who can boost a classic car quickest. She picks a 1966 Dodge Challenger, but inadvertently leaves her ID at the scene of the crime.

Back at her house, she finds a note telling Sage to return the car, or the owner will kill her partner, whom he has kidnapped. She does, even though this puts her in deep water with her employer, for having taken and returned the Dodge in defiance of his orders. And this is where the script goes, not just off the road, but through the crash-barrier and down an embankment into a ravine. For Sage is the recipient of a severed head, and gets framed for the murder of her partner. This forces her on the run, taking shelter in the apartment of hooker friend Brenna (Williams) as the police hunt her. However, rookie cop Fitz (Lombardi) thinks there may be more to it than that. Sage hunts down the owner of the Dodge herself, discovering in the end he is a mad DJ serial killer, who kidnaps and tortures his female victims for the sounds they make, which he incorporates into his mixes.

You may want to read that sentence again. Slowly.

What, pray tell, was wrong with the fresh idea of a young, cocky girl car thief, that it was deemed necessary to apply all this sub-Se7en nonsense to it? It was doing perfectly fine as is. She’d been established as a solid character, with some endearing quirks – for instance, she won’t sleep with any man, unless he first volunteers to cook for her. It would have been interesting enough, to see how she’d handle dealing with her irritable and prone to violence boss. Instead, that angle gets all but discarded when the movie moves on to the “lunatic disk-jockey”. It briefly re-appears, only to be ended in a largely ridiculous method of closure.

The other elements of the film are banal and by the book. You have Fitz and his grizzled partner, who suspects the worst of Sage, for no particular reason (I mean, they could easily figure out the head was severed elsewhere?). And the serial killer is little more than a walking set of cliches, who kidnaps Brenna in order to get to Sage, because… Oh, I dunno. I’d largely lost the will to live by that point in proceedings. So much potential here, only for it to be so completely wasted.

Dir: Kari Skogland
Star: Taryn Manning, Romano Orzari, Michael Lombardi, Genelle Williams

Hockey Night

  By

★★★
“Cool as ice.”

At one point, the teenage heroine in this sports flick is asked, “What do you want to play hockey for?” In a modern film, I suspect you might get a long speech about female empowerment, proving that girls can do anything boys can, and so on. But here, her response is three words: “I like it.” It’s a plain and simple response which illustrates the approach taken by this plain and simple TV movie. That plain simplicity is both its biggest strength and its greatest weakness, for there are certainly no boundaries being broken or preconceptions challenged here. It’s exactly what you would expect from the genre and the story.

The Yarrow family have moved from the big city to the small, rural Canadian town of Parry Sound, described by local girl Evelyn as “the armpit of North America.” When daughter Cathy (Follows) asks Evelyn, “What do you do for fun?”, the reply is, “They haven’t invented it yet.” But they do have hockey…  And Cathy had been the goal-tender for the local girls’ team back in Toronto. Since there’s no equivalent in the small town, she tries out for, and wins, a spot on the local boys’ team, under coach Willy Leipert (Moranis). But this co-ed approach meets with opposition, in particular from the team’s sponsor, who threatens to pull his support if Cathy is allowed to play.

Yeah, from the above you can probably pencil out, with about 95 percent accuracy, how things will unfold, leading up to the finale of the big game between Parry Sound and local rivals, North Bay. Will Cathy fall for the team’s star player, Spear Kozak (Bisson)? Will there be moderate, but non-threatening, family strife as her mother fails to understand? Will curmudgeonly and chauvinist commentator, Bum Johnston (Chaykin) be won over to support her? Will there be montages along the way? I offer no prizes for anyone correctly guessing the answers to all of the above questions.

Yet there’s a simple and honest warmth here that works. Parry Sound is the birthplace of Bobby Orr, who is to hockey what Pele is to football, and the affection for the game is clear. There isn’t much conflict, to be sure – nobody ever tells Cathy directly that she poses a problem. Yet this feels in keeping with the polite and non-confrontational nature of the society depicted here (it would be a sweeping generalization to claim it of Canada as a whole. And yet, not necessarily inaccurate). Sure, her team-mates are sometimes jerks: they are, however, teenage boys, so it goes with the territory, especially with regard to teenage girls.

The two young leads are both very likeable, and it’s easy to see why they went on to greater things. Follows, in particular delivers a quiet, understated performance which is likely far more effective than a brazenly defiant one. Moranis and Chaykin provide good support, and deliver the kind of colourful  characters found in any small town. The plot may be hackneyed and obvious, yet as forty-year-old TV movies go, this is likely better than you would expect.

Dir: Paul Shapiro
Star: Megan Follows, Yannick Bisson, Rick Moranis, Maury Chaykin

Lady Mobster

  By

★★★
“Because ‘Lady Accountant’ wouldn’t have sold as well…”

The salacious sleeve promises considerably more than this can deliver. For we are actually talking a TV movie from the eighties here, with all the limitations that imposes on content and execution. Yet, if sold a lot more on sizzle than steak, and it did come very close to not qualifying here – likely the last scene being when it finally reached the finish line – I can say I was never bored.

Long-time soap opera queen Lucci plays Laurel, the young daughter of a mob family, who witnesses her parents being killed as part of a war between Mafia groups, over whether or not to go legitimate. She’s then taken in by one of her father’s allies, Victor Castle (Wiseman), and grows up as part of his family, becoming a lawyer and eventually marrying his son, Robert (Born). Castle has never given up the dream of getting out of the mob world, and with Laurel’s help is working towards that goal. However, the more traditional families are no less reluctant than they were decades previously, and the resulting feud comes once again to Laurel’s house and loved ones. She ends up taking over as the head of the family, and is now determined to find both those who killed her parents, and those intent on perpetuating the beef now.

It does play like a low-rent version of The Godfather, with Lucci playing the Michael Corleone role of someone who doesn’t really want to get involved in the criminal enterprise, yet finds herself increasingly drawn into it. As such, she’s good in the role, exuding the necessary confidence to make her facing down a room of Mafia dons at least plausible, if still somewhat unlikely. There’s an effective scene early on, when she has a meeting with a prospective partner of the Castles, and rips him a new one for false accounting and fraud. This establishes her character as at least a financial bad-ass, even if there’s precious little gun-play for her to do over the first 85 or so minutes.

Still, director Moxey has been doing this kind of thing for what seems like forever – he directed the original Charlie’s Angels pilot – and keeps the story-line progressing consistently. Certainly, Lauren’s resulting character arc is the best thing the film has going for it, as we see her develop over the course of the film. If this does resemble a pilot episode for a series that never happened, the way it finishes makes it one I would be more than slightly interested in watching. It feels a bit like an eighties version of La Reina Del Sur, with its story of a woman whose family ties to organized crime prove eventually to be a critical formative influence in her life. At the time, that was positively radical, and even if the treatment here is undeniably milder than I’d have preferred, I wasn’t left feeling like I’d been too badly deceived by the cover.

Dir: John Llewellyn Moxey
Star: Susan Lucci, Michael Nader, Roscoe Born, Joseph Wiseman

Trial By Fire

  By

★★
“Not so hot.”

When you hear this is a Lifetime TV movie about a female firefighter, that will probably set up all manner of expectations about what you’re going to get. I am here to tell you, this will deliver on every single one of them. While somewhat salvaged by decent production values – there were a few shots involving flames that genuinely looked impressive – you are not going to find a safer, more predictable ninety minutes of entertainment. It’s less a film than a parade of cliches, beginning with the heroine, rookie fire-fighter Kristin Scott (the appropriately-named Burns!) losing her father, the local station chief, in a blaze on his last day before retirement. Her sister Chelsea blames Kristin, as do her colleagues in the station, leading to her punching one of the latter out.

Seeking to obtain validation and self-respect, Kristin seeks to join the elite group known as “smoke jumpers”. They get dropped in to the most hazardous of situations, to try and stem the flames. To even get into the training, she’s going to have to overcome the prejudices of the existing jumpers, who harbour serious doubts about a woman’s ability to stand up to the physical rigours of the position. I’m not going to detail the plot any further, as you should be able to figure it out from there – right down to a finale where Kristin savwa Chelsea and her husband when their camping trip suddenly becomes a bit toasty. Will there be flirty banter with fellow smoke jumper Ray (Ravanello)? Or another colleague who seeks to sabotage her chances? Maybe. Oh, who am I trying to kid. Of course there is.

Burns is tall enough to be plausible as a fire-fighter, but height and a “can-do” attitude only goes so far. She just doesn’t have the necessary physical presence. A key part of the smoke jumper testing, about which the film makes frequent mention, is the ability to do a mile in 11 minutes while carrying 100 pounds, and you just never get the sense our heroine would be capable of it. Still, this is part and parcel for the territory, and you can’t blame the film for skewing photogenic e.g. cutely smudged, rather than realistic. I do wish they’d done a great deal more with the script, however, which is just staggeringly bland, girl power wish-fulfillment.

It does appear the flames were probably largely added in post-production, yet these don’t have the obvious digital look you often see in such things. We get some impressively scorched earth scenes, which do actually give a sense of how dangerous this job is. It ends by telling us that 27 of the 400 smoke jumpers in the US are women, and that’s got to be a thankless and incredibly demanding task. I sense any one of their stories would probably be more interesting and less hackneyed than the one we get here. I also suspect any real smoke jumpers who watch this, would likely be rolling their eyes furiously.

Dir: John Terlesky
Star: Brooke Burns, Rick Ravanello, Winston Rekert, Wanda Cannon
a.k.a. Smoke Jumper

Grand Theft Auto Girls

  By

★★
“Preferred this when it was called Counterfeiting in Suburbia.”

Turns out that The Asylum are not the only company who makes mockbusters. As its alternate name makes clear, this Lifetime TVM is clearly a knock-off of the title mentioned above, down to the same, basic plot. Two teenage girls begin doing crime, largely for the excitement. A teacher becomes aware of their exploits and decides to blackmail them for his own benefit, by making them escalate their activities. This brings them increasingly under the scrutiny of both authorities and criminal elements, not to mention parental disapproval, eventually leading to a climax where all these aspects cross paths. As my review of Counterfeiting mentioned, it wasn’t even a particularly original idea there. As you can imagine, a second-generation copy is not an improvement, even if the idea of a knock-off of a movie about forgery possesses a certain irony. 

The main twist here is that instead of counterfeiting, the crime in question is car theft. Emily (Belkin) is being brought up by her mother, after her father died in a car accident, and is working to restore her late dad’s muscle car, a task which has helped give her certain car skills, including hot-wiring them. She has teamed up with classmate Max (Helt), to boost cars, purely for joy-riding purposes, but the pair decided to make a commercial endeavour out of it, and sell the vehicles to a local chop-shop they know. Their shop teacher, Mr. Curnow (Hynes) finds out about their work, and decides to use them to start stealing high-end cars, to provide seed money for his own business involving exotic sports vehicles. This doesn’t sit well with the chop-shop owner, the cops are beginning to close in, and worst of all, Emily’s Mom is growing increasingly suspicious. When she pays Curnow a visit at his home, she is held hostage to ensure Emily completes one final task, stealing a Hummer belonging to a well-connected local club owner.

This is so painfully bland, it should have been called Barbie and Friends Do Crimes. Admittedly, I was hoping for something like a female version of a Fast and the Furious movies. As I soon as I realized this was a Lifetime TVM, all hopes of that evaporated, but it could still have avoided having less edge than a rusty butter-knife. It shoehorns in a hot teenage boy delinquent (Manley) on whom Emily can crush, largely as a means of filling time, since he serves no real plot purpose. Even the car-stealing scenes, which could have generated tension, are feeble: witness in particular the example which consists largely of one girl starting intently into her handbag, waiting for a light to go green. Hitchcock is turning in his grave. It did manage to leave me yearning nostalgically for a film which only got 2½ stars, so that’s a new experience.

While I have already written more about this than it deserves, I just discovered there is still another TVM going down the same furrow: Smuggling in Suburbia. I’ll just leave its synopsis here. mostly as a warning that the possibilities appear, sadly, endless: “Joanie gets recruited to travel with other girls to exciting cities delivering camera lenses to photographers–and falls in love with Tucker, a partner in the courier business. When she searches the camera case she’s carrying and finds diamonds hidden inside a lens, Joanie realizes she is part of an illegal smuggling ring! She just needs to pay for her brother’s cancer surgery that would otherwise bankrupt the family.” Yeah, I’m good, thanks.

Dir: Jason Bourque
Star: Zoë Belkin, Samantha Helt, Tyler Hynes, Jake Manley
a.k.a. Hotwired in Suburbia

Dispatch

  By

★★½
“Please continue to hold. Your call is very important to us.”

Christine McCullers (Gubelmann) is a new cop, out on patrol with her father, a long-time veteran of the force. A poor decision involving a robbery suspect leaves Dad dead and Christine crippled. Re-assigned to dispatch, things go from bad to worse, when she gets a call from a kid, which she takes to be some kind of prank. It’s very real, and the caller’s friend ends up murdered as a result. Crucified by social media – not least due to her popping of painkillers to deal with her injury – she’s suspended from duty. Believing the killers are not the victim’s parents as her colleagues think, Christine begins her own investigation to try and achieve redemption through finding the real murderer.

I liked the central character, precisely because she’s not the cookie-cutter, saintly heroine you’d probably expect. She’s severely flawed, easily angered and prone to jump to conclusions which may or may not be justified. Likeable? No. But certainly a bit more interesting than the usual Lifetime angel. Indeed, she has so many flaws, she feels closer to the heroine of a Nordic noir series. The plot, however, is nowhere near as structured or well-considered. Right from the start, the case against the parents is so weak as to be laughable, being based entirely off previous domestic abuse. It’s highly doubtful the cops would pounce in the manner necessary for the plot. Meanwhile, Christine is using her dead father’s badge and gun to continue her own investigation, something which would surely bring down the wrath of internal affairs, regardless of the evidence collected (and I’ve doubts about its resulting admissibility, too).

It all progresses, exactly in the way you’d expect. There is pleasure to be had in watching McCullers charging on through suspects like a (suspended) bull in a china shop. Director Moss was responsible for creating the Bad Ass franchise, starring Danny Trejo as a senior citizen vigilante, and there’s something of the same energy here. It’s certainly more entertaining than the tedious romance with a fellow cop (Fuller). And don’t get me started on the way Christine’s injury, which we learn at the beginning will take two further years to heal, is barely a factor. She tosses her walking aid away in a fit of pique, after being mimicked, mockingly, by a colleague, and is then all but miraculously healed.

There’s no surprises as to who the killer ends up being. Not least because they make the kind of clumsy mistake which only seem to be made by killers in TV movies. What would have been interesting, might have been if the parents had ended up guilty as charged, and McCullers was completely wrong all along, going off on a prescription drug-powered paranoid trip. That’d have been very Nordic noir. Just not very Lifetime, however, and this is instead as safe, basically competent and largely forgettable as most of its ilk.

Dir: Craig Moss
Star: Fiona Gubelmann, Drew Fuller, Scott Bailey, John Lee Ames
a.k.a. 911 Nightmare

High-Rise Rescue

  By

★★½
“All fired up.”

Architect Beth Davis (Bell) is just about to leave Chicago for a business meeting in Miami, when she hears there has been an explosion at the high-rise apartment building downtown, where she lives with husband Jack (Davis) and son Charlie (Arnold). Rushing back home, she finds the situation increasingly perilous, and the fire department unwilling to enter the unstable structure. Having been the person who designed the building, Beth is able to sneak in, with the aid of a sympathetic fireman, Ray Steele (Holmes, looking like a low-rent Tony Todd) on the outside, and begin the perilous climb to the 55th floor where Jack and Charlie are trapped in the bathroom.

When this sticks to the basic, Towering Inferno-like concept of Davis vs. fire, and the heroine making her way up through the burning building, this isn’t bad. There is some decent practical effects work, and although CGI is also used, it’s clear that someone is getting quite close to the flames – even if it’s unlikely to be Bell. The film switches focus frequently between her and her family, as the latter find themselves in increasing peril, despite the helpful advice offered over the phone by Ray. This is quite educational, and if ever I find myself trapped, six hundred feet above the ground and awaiting rescue, I feel I will be reasonably well-informed as to the best tactics for survival.

The problems are much more when the film attempts to build character through the backstory and dialogue, such as the subplot involving Beth and Jack’s shaky marriage, or their differences of opinion as to whether or not to have a second child (though in an admirable shift from what you’d expect, it’s Beth who is less than enthusiastic about the prospect). Watching them swapping dialogue which is so soapy, you could wash the floor with it, is painful – though likely still less cringeworthy than the scene where Ray reveals the personal life experience which resulted in him becoming a fireman. It’s ironic, since an early scene deliberately establishes that, “Fire doesn’t care who or what you are.” The same can probably be said for this viewer.

It’s all rather too implausible, from the moment live TV has a report on the explosion, within literally ten seconds of it taking place. I’m not sure the actions of the fire-brigade quite stand up to scrutiny either: the chief seems far too unconcerned about the civilians that are still present in the conflagration. I’d like to have seen them make more use of Beth’s position as the building’s architect, putting her specialist knowledge to good use, instead of all but forgetting about it, as soon as she enters the basement. The results just about skate by as a way to pass 90 minutes, mostly thanks to a decent performance from Bell. But it’s a long way short of being even disaster soft-porn, and will barely leave even a scorch mark on most surfaces.

Dir: Robert Vaughn
Star: Catherine Bell, Adrian Holmes, Greg Bryk, Sam Ashe Arnold

Dead in the Water

  By

★★½
“Becalmed”

My heart sank in the first few seconds, when I discovered that this was a SyFy Original Movie. The really poor CGI, of a ship sailing on the ocean, seemed to confirm that I was in for one of their bottom of the barrel productions. In the end, however, this was… just about okay. Incredibly derivative, to be sure, and that’s not its only problem. Yet it still just about sustained my interest. That’s certainly not always the case for SyFy Original Movies, to put it mildly.

This takes place almost entirely on the not-so-good ship Amphitrite, an eco-warrior vessel engaged in tracking illegal Chinese trawlers. Its engine breaks down, right in the path of an incoming storm. They then pick up a survivor out of the water, who turns out to be infected with… something. Which is why he’s telling the crew, “Kill me… Then kill yourselves.” Needless to say, they don’t quite follow his suggestion. Before you can say “Alien rip-off“, they’re moving slowly around the dimly-lit corridors of the ship in search of… something. And before you can say “Thing rip-off,” they’re watching video off the survivor’s phone, and getting paranoid about who among them might, or might not, be infected.

It’s an all-female crew, which is why the film is here, and it’s admirable that no-one explicitly mentions this or makes a fuss about it. They are what they are, seven women who are competent at their jobs – and of course, it’s a reflection of the all-male cast in John Carpenter’s The Thing. The problem is that there isn’t enough effort put into differentiating them, or establishing them as individuals. I’m not certain I could tell you most of their names, or identify them even with a particular characteristic. I’m going to guess the one called “Sparks” was the ship’s engineer. Otherwise, they seemed entirely interchangeable.

The other problem was already mentioned in passing: the remarkable lack of lighting. Look, I get that the ship “lost power”. I understand that your creature budget of 15 South African Rand probably can’t stand up to the harsh glare of daylight. But there is a limit to how much sloth-like meandering along corridors by near-candlelight I can tolerate. And this film reaches that quota inside the first 30 minutes, then keeps right on meandering. Inevitably, the dwindling band of survivors eventually igure out what exactly they are going to do, and how they are going to stop the creature from reaching the all-you-can-infect buffet which is civilization. To the movie’s credit, it doesn’t shy away from the downbeat conclusion of The Thing, though as appears inevitable with SyFy Original Movies, there’s a coda which leaves the door open to a sequel no-one wants or needs.

In the end, the problem is as always: if you steal from the best, you’ll be compared to the best. And Dead in the Water comes up short of The Thing and Alien, by the width of several oceans.

Dir: Sheldon Wilson
Star: Nikohl Boosheri, Christia Visser, Tanya Van Geaan, Bianca Simone Mannie

Fatal Defense

  By

★★½
“There is nothing that’s going to empower you more, than if you kick the crap out of somebody. “

Single mother Arden Walsh (Scott) and her daughter Emma (Guest) are traumatized by a home invasion, and at the insistence of mom’s cop sister, Gwen (Fortier), Arden signs on for a self-defense class given by the hunky Logan Chase (Cade). He’s a bit… intense, shall we say. Despite some initial bonding over their ex-marriedness, it’s not too long before Arden discovers his methods leave “unconventional” lying in the dust. Probably about the point where he zip-ties Arden and tosses her in the trunk of his car. At this stage, she decides to forego further classes. Except, Logan is having none of it, and even teams up with the original burglar to put Arden through further “training”.

By this point, I’ve seen enough Lifetime TVM to know where this was going, and if you’re a regular here, you’ll have read enough reviews to figure it out as well. Logan ends up kidnapping Emma, in order to lure Arden to her final “examination”. Though I can’t help thinking, this works mostly as a tacit commercial for firearm ownership. If Arden had only followed Gwen’s advice in the self-defense department – rather than responding, “I’m not gonna have a gun in my house with Emma, no way” – the problem which is Logan would have been solved a) a great deal more quickly, and b) with considerably less trauma for little Emma. The finale, involving the intervention of detective Inspector Banks (Sherilyn Fenn), kinda proves this point.

The biggest flaw is the lack of credible motive for Logan. It’s not quite clear what he’s trying to do here. Seems like Arden is not his first victim, and he has clearly been unhinged by the loss of his wife during a rural robbery. Yet I can’t help but think there were easier ways to achieve his (ill-defined) goals, not least because he seems almost to want to die at the hands of his trainees. I suspect that picking on the thoroughly no-nonsense Gwen might have presented a better chance of that happening, and it does seem a bit of pointless doubling up to have both her and Inspector Banks as supporting characters, even if it’s to get round the “You’re not allowed to investigate cases involving your own relatives” rule. Which I presume is a thing.

While I’d rather have seen more of Fortier, Scott is okay as the lead, and her action scenes occasionally have slightly more impact than I expected. However, this is largely doomed by the relentless predictability of things as they unfold. There are two particularly obvious bits of foreshadowing: one involving hot tea, the other wet leaves. About the only thing which remains in question is, which one of these will actually be relevant to the ending, and which will be a red herring. I’ve no intention in spoiling all the film’s slight pleasures, so if you want to find out, you are going to have to watch this yourself.

Dir: John Murlowski
Star: Ashley Scott, David Cade, Sophie Guest, Laurie Fortier

Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI

  By

★★
“Not-so fair cop”

This 1986 TV movie was the first film made about an FBI agent while they were still active. Gibson was the fifth black female agent in the bureau’s history: she broke new ground by being the first such assigned to the Fugitive Matters department in the Miami branch, and was also the first to reach a supervisory level within the FBI. That would, however, be well after the story told in this film. It covers how she came to join the FBI, and her first major undercover operation, taking down a gun-running ring operated by ex-NFL star, Adam Prentice (Lawson). However, Gibson starts to find the lines between real-life and undercover work blurring, and begins feeling genuine affection for her target. This doesn’t sit well with her partner, TC (Rollins). If it sounds all very by the numbers… It is.

No less stereotypical are the other black men in Gibson’s life. Most notable are her sternly disciplinarian father, who thrashes Johnnie after she accepts a Thanksgiving gift on a surplus turkey from some white folks, and Marvin (Young), the husband she meets at college. The latter is thoroughly unimpressed when she announces – in a staggeringly clunky fashion, showing up in full uniform – that’s she going to join the police force. You can imagine his reaction to her becoming an FBI agent, and his perpetual whining is perhaps the film’s most annoying aspect. Though it has to be said, when it comes to caring for their daughter, Gibson is very much the absent mother.

All the background stuff is bounced over so quickly as to be little more than a parade of cliches. Yeah, we get it: she had to overcome some obstacles. Though based on the evidence here, racism wasn’t really one of them, and the way sexism is depicted has some flaws, for example when a fellow trainee at Quantico kicks her ass repeatedly in hand-to-hand training. For this begs an obvious question: would a criminal in the field go easy on an FBI agent trying to arrest them, because they were a woman? Of course not. From that viewpoint, this incident was actually less sexism than a reality check. It could have been welcomed as such, showing Johnnie she needs to use her brain rather than brawn, rather than a simplistic message of The Man Keeping A Woman Down (literally).

The undercover case is not much better in this department, trotting out the usual tropes before suddenly exploding into a gun-battle at the end, which even Gibson, in interviews at the time it was shown, noted was entirely fictional. The TV movie seems particularly guilty of trying to cram too much in, and would have been better served by focusing either on its subject’s journey to becoming an agent, or on her work thereafter. By attempting to cover both, it succeeds in covering neither adequately. While the subject is undeniably worthy, I can’t say that this treatment feels as if it does her justice.

Dir: Bill Duke
Star: Lynn Whitfield, William Allen Young, Howard Rollins, Richard Lawson