Lifetime movie inspired by true story

A DEADLY ADOPTION (2015)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

The last thing I ever expected Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig to make was a full 2-hour parody of a Lifetime movie...for Lifetime! Well, sort of a parody...let's say that the joke is a one-joke movie but boy is the joke funny. It plays it absolutely straight as it should.

Will Ferrell is Robert, a best-selling author of financial responsibility books, living with his wife and child in a placid lake house. Kristen Wiig is Sarah, the wife, who is shown as pregnant in the opening scenes. She foolishly heads to the dock and is ready to go boating when she slips and falls in the lake, in the kind of slow-motion scene that always looks absurd in any of those movies. Here, it is looks doubly absurd with Ferrell running after her in slow-motion. Years pass with Ferrell always seated on a bench overlooking the dock. Sometimes, he opens the drawer to his desk and, voila, a tempting bottle of wine is inside though he has been on the wagon. Wiig meanwhile maintains an organic food stand where her products sell through the roof. There is also their diabetic daughter who Ferrell is far too overprotective of. All seems well until a young brunette, Bridgette (Jessica Lowndes), becomes the new surrogate mother to their family. Yep, she's trouble from the start and the rest of you can figure out what happens next.

"A Deadly Adoption" is a complete farce but it is played with such a minimum of forced exaggeration that it works in spite of itself. Even the over-the-top shenanigans including the surrogate mother, who has financial ambitions and is not what she seems, a kidnapping and then another of one those slo-mo climaxes show how forced these events can be played in these TV movies. Ferrell and Wiig make a sweet married couple and his own past indiscretions play out hilariously, particularly flashbacks to Ferrell's book tours. What makes the movie sing is that Ferrell and Wiig make one smile at every instance that they utter banal dialogue. Even Jessica Lowndes, who at first is seemingly seducing Ferrell, turns out to be an amoral money-grubber - the movie shifts Bridgette's character with far too many shifts. By the end of the film, she is literally a second cousin to Alex from "Fatal Attraction." Lowndes plays the ridiculous surrogate mother even straighter than the star leads, an accomplishment considering we never know who she is or her ultimate goal - the screenwriters are at fault and purposely so.

"A Deadly Adoption" is purposely unbelievable and as melodramatic as one can imagine - I am sure the Lifetime network sees the self-awareness as a criticism of sorts. You won't believe a moment of "A Deadly Adoption"...and you are not meant to.