User Reviews

I liked the concept of the movie, which involved an 11 year old boy who was kidnapped from his parents when he was three by a couple who raised him as their son, and the boy running away to find his real parents after finding out that he was kidnapped. The previous person to write a comment on this film asked if there is a biography on this boy. This work is fiction as far as I believe, but I am also wondering if it is based on an actual case. If not a "true story", I am assuming this film was loosely inspired by the case of other kidnapped children who returned to their parents, especially Steven Stayner. He was the kid who was kidnapped at seven years of age in 1972 and made it back to his parents after living with his captor for seven years; and the TV film about that case (I Know My First name is Steven) was made one year before this film.

I liked this film except for the parts with the characters getting murdered, attempting to murder, or killing themselves (the death of the kidnapper's other son not being an accident, Meredith Baxter's character shooting her husband, her trying to kill Billy/Tommy when he goes to his real mother, and her killing herself at the end of the film). These scenes I feel take away from the human story of this film and make is less real and more like a generic TV thriller. I believe that with such a story about a boy trying to return to his real parents it should be told more as a drama rather than as a thriller that's more scary than realistic. Also, I would have rather had the home where Billy's real mother lives be less grim (i.e. more spacious and the mother being married). If he went to live with his real mother, they should have had him move in with both his mother and his father and to a home not looking more grim than the one he moved out of.

This movie always stuck with me, probably because I was Billy's age when I first saw it on TV. So some of the plot elements were fascinating to 11-year-old me - the kidnapping, the running away, the murder. Re-watching it 32 years later, I remembered the basic plot and even some specific scenes and lines, like when the "Dad" spotted Billy in the tree and didn't say anything, or when Billy told his "Mom" he loved her and she was a good mother but just wasn't his. So kudos to the writers and actors for creating something that resonated with and haunted me a bit as a kid.

That said, it's obviously a cheap TV movie with all the shortcomings you'd expect, especially bad editing and uneven flow. I'd forgotten how much time the movie devotes to the boy traveling. During that journey, he encounters a trucker, a creep we presume is a pedophile (an implication I obviously missed at age 11), and an aspiring model/escort he meets at the bus station - all of whom I'd forgotten about during the 32 years since last I saw this movie. Instead of spending so much time on his journey, I would rather have had a slower burn to his discovery of his parents secrets, and more exploration about his feelings about everything. Might have been helpful to add a peer-age friend Billy could talk to who could help him or, if that's what they were trying to do with the teacher character, use her more effectively.

There were dozens of plot points that made little to no sense, of course, but I'll just highlight a couple of the most distracting. First is the whole Tulane family timeline. So they had only one biological child, a boy named Tommy who died when he fell accidentally from a window. After that, they kidnapped another child, raised him as "Billy" and pushed him down the stairs when he started to remember he'd been kidnapped, when he was about 10. That's the grave they visit in the first scene. Then they kidnapped a second child, the star of this film, whose name coincidentally was Billy, but they decided to call him Tommy after the first child who fell out of the window? Huh? Second, how did Billy (the main character) come to believe he was from Brooklyn specifically? From recognizing aerial footage in one of his classes? Why would he recognize aerial footage of Brooklyn when he hadn't been there since he was 3? Also, Brooklyn is ENORMOUS. There were 2.3 million people living there in 1990, it's not like you can just take a subway to "Brooklyn" and start looking around for playgrounds. It's plausible that a cab driver might realize that the kid was looking for Kessen Place, but how did he possibly find his way home from the Kessen Place playground and just so happen to ring the right doorbell on the first try? All it would've taken would be for him to have memories of some distinctive feature of his house, and show him wandering around the playground till he saw it. And, finally, how in the world did Billy's "Mom" track him down at his birth mother's home, within 30 seconds of him and his real mom reuniting? The entire arc of Billy's kidnapper following him to New York and him spotting her broken-down car on the highway and her spotting him at Port Authority, what are the odds of these things happening? 10 million to 1?

Anyway, fun to revisit.