****WARNING- THIS REVIEW CONTAINS POTENTIAL SPOILERS**** I remember hearing about the real story on the news my first year of high school, especially how people followed the story afterward on and off till the final phase of the trial. Having said that, anyone giving this movie an over critical review really needs to take a look within themselves.
While Brooke Shields and Richard Thomas are the stars of this tele-film, the support of the ensemble cast that gives it an even stronger foundation. While liberties were taken with more minor things in comparison to the main thrust of the saga, a number of them were psychologically geared to cover ground on the way far too many viewers took the ridiculously naive positions that either Laura Black led Richard Farley on or that she was "misunderstanding the situation.
Even dismissing those things, as well as the comparison of "John Boy" in the role of a disturbed man who was in real life "built like a bear", the heart of the movie is about how a delusional personality can go that intensely spiraling out of control. A man who went from being self-disciplined enough to spend an entire decade in the military to the first ever stalking-connected workplace massacre all because he believed people "thought he was weak" or "a joke" doesn't make anyone feel sorry for Richard Wade Farley, and it shouldn't because it can't. That he "never had a criminal record" nor "committed a single act of violence before" (that is according to his defense at the time...)casts him in an even more despicable light as it spotlights more what he always was: an abusive bully who mastered the mask he wore all of those years looking for the right target.
Laura was portrayed as having said "What did I do?" when she was loaded in the ambulance. The film, and how it ends, gives that answer: Laura Black didn't do anything, except be the perfect target for a disturbed sociopath who, even if she HAD agreed to the "one date", would NEVER have let her go. The frightening part is that the way it really turned out made the body count a hell of a lot smaller than it would have been if she HADN'T been that strong to fight him.
While Brooke Shields and Richard Thomas are the stars of this tele-film, the support of the ensemble cast that gives it an even stronger foundation. While liberties were taken with more minor things in comparison to the main thrust of the saga, a number of them were psychologically geared to cover ground on the way far too many viewers took the ridiculously naive positions that either Laura Black led Richard Farley on or that she was "misunderstanding the situation.
Even dismissing those things, as well as the comparison of "John Boy" in the role of a disturbed man who was in real life "built like a bear", the heart of the movie is about how a delusional personality can go that intensely spiraling out of control. A man who went from being self-disciplined enough to spend an entire decade in the military to the first ever stalking-connected workplace massacre all because he believed people "thought he was weak" or "a joke" doesn't make anyone feel sorry for Richard Wade Farley, and it shouldn't because it can't. That he "never had a criminal record" nor "committed a single act of violence before" (that is according to his defense at the time...)casts him in an even more despicable light as it spotlights more what he always was: an abusive bully who mastered the mask he wore all of those years looking for the right target.
Laura was portrayed as having said "What did I do?" when she was loaded in the ambulance. The film, and how it ends, gives that answer: Laura Black didn't do anything, except be the perfect target for a disturbed sociopath who, even if she HAD agreed to the "one date", would NEVER have let her go. The frightening part is that the way it really turned out made the body count a hell of a lot smaller than it would have been if she HADN'T been that strong to fight him.