If you’ve got time for just one Netflix movie on predator guardianships and the lawyers who prey on seniors with assets, and the nursing homes, health care workers and even judges in on the fix, I recommend “I Care a Lot.”
It’s got Rosamund Pike, theatrical feature production values and a mob connection that feeds the fantasy that sometimes, these bottom-feeders get exactly what’s coming to them.
But “The Bad Guardian” does a decent job of getting the blood boiling over unethical lawyers and “the system” that lets them come between families and their elders, all but ensuring neglectful elder care and draining their bank accounts in the process.
Just fighting back against the byzantine practices of probate court is “like asking for an invitation to a club they don’t want you in,” our heroine Leigh (Melissa Joan Hart) protests.
That’s the best line in this Lifetime Original Movie, a melodrama that piles up obstacles and raises the stakes — attempted murder, neglect and restraining orders and surgeries ordered out of spite — even if we hope that it’ll serve up some measure of justice by the finale.
Leigh and her housebuilding husband Luis (Luis Bordonada) have to leave a winter vacation in a mountain cabin with their two kids when “Dad won’t answer his phone.”
They dash home to their corner of suburban Tennessee only to find Dad’s house locked, his cell phone on the floor and a puddle of blood next to it. One missing person report later, he turns up — in the too-aptly-named “Shadyside Nursing Home.”
Subtle, Lifetime. And well played.
“How’d you wind up here?” is the next stage of Leigh’s nightmare. A self-righteous and condescending attorney (La La Anthony, magnificently vile) has gotten a chummy judge (Pat Dortch) to make her legal guardian of Leigh’s 80something dad (Eric Pierpoint).
Leigh’s a waitress in a diner. Her husband’s a skilled laborer. They have two kids. They don’t have money for a lawyer, and even their kids’ college fund is an asset in her dad’s hands.
Lawyer Timms has trouble feigning sympathy, but has her “family neglect” patter down cold. She’s in charge. And every person Leigh turns to seems subject to Timms’ money, position and coziness with the court — an ex-lawyer/victim (Teri Clark), a TV reporter (Eddie Yu), and even a sympathetic nurse (Mystie Smith).
It’s enough to chill older viewers and the family members of the elderly right to the marrow. And if you aren’t in either boat right, buy that life jacket now and tuck it away. A storm’s coming for you, too.
The movie’s melodramatic flourishes are obvious, and its narrative choppy (editing with commercial breaks built-in) and incomplete. Leigh’s plucky pursuit of justice is noble, but short on details.
We aren’t talking Erin Brockovich, here.
Hart, like most former child actors, developed her chops and range on TV shows (“Clarissa Explains it All,” “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”) so undemanding and assembly-line quick that bad habits became ingrained and hitting Big Notes in drama was wrung right out of her repetoire.
While Ashley Gable’s script and Claudia Myers’ brisk but spark-free direction of it may get us worked up over the outrage of it all, some of it almost as far fetched as having a guardian “kidnap” a mobster’s mom by mistake, the picture lacks a knock out punch. The abrupt payoff never amounts to more than an unsatisfying cheat.
That’s “Lifetime Ever After” for you.
So go watch “I Care a Lot” instead. Seriously.
Rating: TV-14, violence
Cast: Melissa Joan Hart, La La Anthony, Luis Bordonada, Eric Pierpoint, Eddie Yu, Teri Clark and Pat Dortch.
Credits: Directed by Claudia Myers, scripted by Ashley Gable. A Lifetime Original Movie on Netflix.
Running time: 1:27
