Apparently, this 2001 TV movie was made as a vehicle for Jane Seymour and her husband James Keach to executive produce a film, in which also she stars and he directs. The movie's backers undoubtedly expected that her presence and the mystery/suspense premise would cause viewers to tune in, maybe even be lulled into believing it was a quality project by the couple's overall personal involvement in it. I hope the people behind the film gained something from the experience. Because there was precious little in it for the audience.
Seymour plays a concerned wife and mother who aspires to be a discrimination lawyer. A hasty, early scene shows her attending class, where she modestly scribbles in her notebook the answer to a question from the professor that no one else in class can come up with, before scurrying out in mid-class to take a cell phone call from her teen-age daughter. The daughter chafes under her mother's attention and restrictions, complains about always having to take care of her sullen 10-year-old brother, and wants to go to "Woodbine Mall" that night to pick up her prom dress. Seymour insists on taking her, along with the brother (it will be at night and the mall is in "a bad part of town"). The son mopes and says little, mostly blurting out cynical assessments about his dad. The husband is under the gun financially, bottles up his emotions, and is uncomfortable talking to his kids about anything other than video games and shopping. He left a successful public relations agency to start his own firm with a partner. Their firm is now failing. Its ability to stave off bankruptcy probably depends on a dinner meeting that night with a prospective client that, we soon see in another slapdash scene, falls flat.
On the way to the mall during a rainstorm, Seymour and her kids stop in a long line at the Post Office, where she needs to drop off an overnight package of "bid" materials for her husband. In line, they cross paths with a pushy, weird-acting young man, who claims that he just wants to "help," be "considerate," and play by "the rules," but has to be thrown out for harassing Seymour and her daughter (who actually warms up to the jerk at first before Seymour sends her ahead to the mall by bus). Earlier, we had seen the weirdo leave his apartment. As he loudly and awkwardly shouted a wordy goodbye from the doorway over his shoulder and back into the apartment, supposedly to his mother within, a neighbor complained about a bad smell in the hall, guessing that a rat might have died in the building. After being ejected from the Post Office, the guy drives toward the mall, is cut off in traffic by another car, repeatedly rams the car, and abandons his own vehicle to scream at the other drivers and continue on foot.
Seymour, the kids, and the psycho converge on a mall clothing store. The daughter gets separated from the rest of the family when she quarrels with her mother, storms off to the dressing room, and the power goes out. The psycho skulks around grinning in the dark nearby, where a couple making noise in the dressing room suddenly falls silent. Eventually, he somehow manages to abduct and hide away, at some distance, in a far-fetched location, Seymour's kids. A harried store security guard appears from time to time but is useless. Periodically, the film cuts away to some looters breaking windows below, on the ground level. Seymour's husband, at home playing video games after the unsuccessful dinner meeting, gets concerned and jumps into the car. Absurdly, on his way to the mall, he crashes into some garbage cans, is accosted by some street punks, and takes off in someone else's car. He finally arrives at the mall and clumsily helps Seymour in an obligatory and uninteresting final fight scene and an implausible, panic search for and release of the endangered kids, moments before some machinery crushes them. Once outside, the family (and viewers) get the only explanation the movie has to offer, a couple of quick throwaway lines by the police about the psycho: "We found his mother's body. He just snapped. We'll probably never know why." That's it.
The movie's only good points are the performances by Seymour, natural as always and into her role as a decent, busy, trying-to-stay-involved mother, the beautiful actress playing her spirited daughter, and the pint-sized, deadpan, wiseguy son in their interactions together. Otherwise, the film is a complete waste of time.
The movie lightly sketches characters and subplots in ways that have little or nothing to do with the main story. The husband, played with bland lack of distinction by William Russ, is an uninteresting, ineffectual cliché. The psycho is so poorly drawn, his lines and actions so meaningless, that it seems as if there is nothing to him but a blur of aimless ham acting.
The story is paper-thin and the storytelling slow-paced, amateurish, and ineffective, with sketchy, stray, undeveloped elements never worked together into a dramatic whole. Not much changes even when it gets to the drawn-out hide-and-seek with the psycho in the blacked-out mall store. It is not easy to tell what is happening in the dark, and nothing much ever seems to happen. The movie throws in ill-defined and poorly dramatized surrounding events, such as the "looting," to no real effect. The cutaway shots throughout the movie to exaggerated scenes of busy-acting electric company workmen running around and shouting about the danger of an area-wide power failure -- apparently from nothing more than a run-of-the-mill thunder storm -- are forced, unbelievable, and feeble attempts to gin up suspense.
This movie should never have been made, much less released, in this form.
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