Dying for A Daughter (2020 TV Movie)
8/10
Anyone else was rooting for the blonde?
18 January 2021
I surfed onto this in progress. The first thing that struck me was how the blonde wasn't using that annoying voice fry I'd expected from her. That took me aback, so I paused to watch a scene then surfed out, only to come right back after a few min. I must say the prettier Shakira look-alike gave a strong performance.

Now, I read the other reviews. People don't seem to have watched Lifetime movies. You don't rate it like a real movie but you rate it compared to the rest of crap this channel puts out. And this was not bad. I found the platinum woman compelling to watch. (Brittany Underwood... is she supposed to be famous? The name rings a bell but I couldn't place her, even after going down her filmography and PS: this isn't listed there!)

I liked when she killed the woman in the car, she barely exerted herself. (I am guessing that was direction?) Sometimes she looked younger than her (32?) age and sometimes she looked 42, like when she went berserk killing the welfare check woman.

What else can I say? It's a Lifetime movie, you don't take them serious. It was well lit. Oh and the mother was so annoying, from the get-go you had to root for the bad girl. Or am I the only 1? Why can't dumb movie channels like Lifetime give us what we want already? Imagine the precedent this could have set: she gets away with all the murders at the end! Come on, we all wanted that! i mean come on: the Hays Code is long over, so act like it! I mean what is this, the ABC Family channel resurrected and crossed with Hallmark? Have some guts, Lifetime and help us murder-and-get-away-with it via proxy. None of us gonna murder anyone, all of us have a couple dozen peeps on our hit list. (Particularly now!) Give us what we want or else: we change channels. Lifetime totally lost an opportunity to make headlines the next day with the social media being all like "WTF?" and other channels going copycat for the (diluted) same effect. Oh, well!

For the bad part: we aren't told at the end if she's really the girl's mother. I say yes. Also worse: the casting of the girl. Nothing against the girl, per se, but against the terrible casting director and choice: this girl was too old and too precocious. It would have made for a more interesting story if the girl had the (sorely needed) "angelical" quality. Think "Gracie" from The Nanny. The kid didn't need to be a 6 year old, but she definitely needed more vulnerability factor, to put the viewer a bit more on edge (for those that know how to "get into a movie" and pretend it's real). Also she wasn't that experienced an actress for the part, such as at the Byrd Cafe when she says "really?" after Blondie told her the story of what happened to her baby daughter. There was nothing behind that word, substance-wise, and the Gracie actress had her character down pat and acting chops in droves.

All in all, it's probably a 7/10 for LifeTime level of non-movies, this is pretty good so I'm bumping it to an 8/10, for Blondie's performance only. Does she moonlight as Shakira's double in her spare time? She's so much prettier, and her platinum-ish hair gave her creepy vibes to perfection for her character. Hope to see her in something else soon.
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