Last night's Lifetime "premiere" movie was called "A Mother's Greatest Fear," which revolves around the Goulds: mom Alice (Katrina Begin, top-billed); dad Brent (Joey Lawrence), who's a business partner with Alice in a land-development company as well as being her husband; and their daughter Maddy (Lily Delamere), who's getting restive under her mother's relentless overprotectiveness. Alice was formerly a police officer whose specialty was negotiating in hostage situations, and she worked with a partner, a detective named Steve Roberts (David Chokachi) who had the hots for her, though their relationship vibrated with mutual sexual attraction but stopped short of actual consummation. Their careers got derailed when they were assigned to go after a young man named Nick (Ian Niles), who had kidnapped his girlfriend Lily (Samm Wiechec) and was threatening to kill her with a knife at her throat if she didn't leave home and run away with him. Alice tried to bring Nick down with a gun, but her shot went wild and wounded Lily instead of Nick, whereupon Nick stabbed Lily fatally - and Alice blamed herself for Lily's death, quit the police force and joined her husband's business as his partner. This experience has made Alice fanatically overprotective towards her daughter Maddy, who in the opening scene asks for permission to attend a party with her high-school classmates (she's a senior but her mom is still driving her to school every morning, a fact for which her fellow students rib her), and mom gives her a flat-out no. Maddy sneaks out and goes to the party anyway, putting cushions in her bed so when mom looks in she'll think Maddy is still asleep. Maddy steals a pair of silver-flecked designer shoes of her mom's and walks to the party but leaves when the other kids there start passing around a bottle of wine and drinking from it. Alas, she's followed on her way walking home by a stranger in a mysterious SUV, who parks in such a way as to block Maddy's passage and knocks her out with an anesthetic, then throws her into the back of the car and drives off with her. The kidnapper then takes Maddy to what looks like a boiler room and ties her to a pipe, gagging her so she can't scream for help, and when Maddy asks what ransom he wants, the kidnapper responds by flashing a note reading, "Do not call the police." Mom decides that since she and her friend Steve - who's now working as a security guard after he quit the force over the Lily incident - used to be cops, they can solve Maddy's kidnapping themselves without having to report the crime officially.
The film cuts between rather dull scenes between Maddy and her abductor - who's dressed all in black, with a hood and a plastic mask that makes looks like Darth Vader's - and more interesting sequences of Alice and Steve investigating the crime. There's also a third plot strain that emerges around Alice's husband Brent, who in dealings he's carefully concealed from Alice has formed a partnership to develop a New York condo building with a mysterious man named Tony, who keeps calling Alice to complain that Brent is dodging meetings with him during his latest business trip to New York. Of course, in just about every Lifetime movie in which a married man takes a lot of out-of-town "business trips," "business trip" is code for "affair," and Brent's adulterous inamorata is right here at home: she's Victoria (Tandi Tugwell), Alice's office assistant. Alice and Steve learn from an old friend of his, a woman who works with the FBI, that Brent was under investigation for money laundering and quite a lot of illicit cash has been flowing through the business, recorded in secret online books Brent didn't let Alice see. Tony, his mystery partner in the New York condo development, is a mobster whom Brent took money from because he was too much in debt on his other projects to get capital from legitimate sources. Alice and Steve conclude that Maddy's kidnapping has something to do with Brent's mob ties and Tony is involved, but the kidnapper turns out to be someone with a more personal motive.
Katrina Begin looks too good for the role of Alice: young, sexy, clad in tight tops and even tighter jeans, she doesn't for one minute look old enough to have a daughter who's a senior in high school. Indeed, she and Lily Delamere look more like sisters than like mother and daughter. (Oddly, her hair designer gives Begin a considerably uglier hairdo in the tag scene than she has in the rest of the movie.) Also, neither of the two men in Alice's life is particularly attractive - Joey Lawrence as Brent shaves his head and has a moustache (virtually all his scenes show him in close-up so we don't get much of an idea what the rest of his body is like), while David Chokachi as Steve is tall, blond and has a great bod but is a bit too craggy-faced (and visibly old) to be man-meat dreamboat material. And Tandi Tugwell is so much less attractive than Katrina Begin - dark-haired and with an oddly lined face - one wonders why Brent is trading down by having an affair with her instead of staying with that hot, sexy wife of his! Nonetheless, "A Mother's Greatest Fear" is a better-than-average Lifetime movie - at least the characters are personable and there isn't a super-villain whose powers defy credibility - and it stuck closely enough to the Lifetime formula to "deliver the goods" while still offering a few neat variations on it.
