You won't be disappointed!

A Major Disappointment

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Struggling single mom who has nightmares of a past abusive relationship starts dating a guy who's too good to be true. I normally don't watch these types of made-for-TV movies. I prefer the lighter ones, like romantic comedies and Christmas movies. But I like Sarah Lancaster so I decided to give this a shot. As I feared, it's not very good. All of the twists are telegraphed far in advance. I mean, the promos for this and every synopsis you find online gives out major plot elements anyway but assuming you went into this completely oblivious to all of that, I still think you'll figure everything in this movie out at least 20 minutes before the main character does. Also they hammered home how hard up she is financially to the point that it became kind of annoying. In the first half-hour they couldn't go a full scene without this chick reminding someone that she's broke as a joke. And yet she lives in a nice house, drives a nice car, wears nice clothes, etc. It was unbelievable. Oh and the Value Mart conversation between her and her friend was hilarious to me. I think this was supposed to make us relate to Sarah's character and think "Wow, this woman has to shop at discount stores! She's like people!" It's pretty funny. The acting by all involved ranges from terrible to adequate. It's not like the material is challenging but I guess people strike out in softball, too. On a superficial note, Sarah is stunningly beautiful and Natalia Cigliuti is pretty easy on the eyes, too. So there's that.

Imagine a world in which you can't trust anyone but your mother and NOTHING is as it appears.Such is the setting for "The Preacher's Mistress," which was pretty bad, but not so bad that I didn't want to see it through to its conclusion.It is extremely formulaic in that, if you're experienced with Lifetime movies, you can see the plot twists from a mile away. From the moment we see that Gwen has a flat and the preacher materializes from nowhere to fix it, we know exactly where this nihilistic story is heading.The movie treats the viewer like a fool, virtually underlining, underscoring, and adding exclamation points to help us grasp that Sidney isn't the insightful friend she appears but rather a cunning fiend. I have to admit I liked the performance of Sarah Lancaster. She does well in the entirely believable position of a woman who trusts the charming guy she goes to bed with. (Is there a woman out there who doesn't identify?) I agree with a previous reviewer that the movie ends on a saccharine note, tying everything up in a bow that turns the dystopia of this film into a fairy-tale fantasy. Er, OK.

This movie is a delightful addition to my favorite Lifetime category which I lovingly call "Get The Bitch." It's when the lead actress finally does something so stupid that you're compelled to start rooting for the villain. This time it's when our lonely lovely is distraught enough to confront her bad-beau at his church - an idea so terrible that she then deserves everything that happens afterward - as well as before.To be clear, this movie was quite enjoyable overall as a good many of the movies in the "genre" are. A woman with a young boy becomes a damsel in slight distress and is befriended by a a man who, quite naturally, becomes her boyfriend. Of course, nothing is what it seems to her, even though we know exactly what's happening. If the title itself doesn't offer enough of a clue, "The Preacher's Mistress" is soon over her head with enough problems to last a lifetime - possibly quite literally.But while her naiveté and stupidity are actually very believable, the ending isn't, and as a viewer, that's distressing because the final scene of endangerment could have easily been done, say, as an attempt to stage suicide, with our poor mistress being saved in a nick of time by the private investigator her mother had hired to follow the no-good boyfriend.Instead, we got a preposterous denouement in which the investigator had to be idiotic enough, not to mention close enough, to allow it all to happen before our drugged heroine saves both herself and P.I. guy. Then, throw in an instant romance and roll credits.

As Sidney, Gwen's best friend, Natalia Cigulari is absolutely devastating and totally credible until the film's ridiculous denouement. Eleese Lester, a native Texan, in this Houston-based story, is excellent as the mother our heroine thinks is too controlling but is actually the only thing between her and "Texas Justice." On the other hand, our heroine Gwen, portrayed by dewy-eyed Sarah Lancaster, seems to be reading her lines from a teleprompter. And that's just one of this film's many problems. The direction is so heavy-handed and the musical cues remove a lot of the tension from a plot that actually is well above-average in its innate craftiness and set-up of the situation. That's why I even bothered to write this one up. The film's "book" deserves remaking and Ms. Cigulari and Ms. Lester were perfect in their roles. Most of the rest of the cast was at least serviceable with the actress playing the police detective being better than that. The actor playing the other villain, the married Preacher,who pretends to be an unmarried pharmaceutical sales executive who sweeps Gwen off her feet as part of the nefarious plan, is quite good and well cast as well. But the heavy handed direction uses sinister music and then shows us too soon that Sidney is not who she seems to be. This could have been almost a Hitchcockian thriller if we didn't find this out until the climax and if we did not have a director who would be third choice for a third-rate soap opera episode. And as others have said, in the last 15 minutes the villains take all their clever plotting and perfect frame and throw it straight out the window so our heroine can escape. So what could've been a thriller to rival Dial M for Murder ends in characters behaving in a way totally foreign to everything they had done until now and turning our clueless and drugged heroine into a resourceful action hero. Too bad.