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**SPOILERS** Not really wanting to have anything to do with this case true crime & mystery writer Bruce Simon Barker gets himself up to his neck in murder and kidnapping with the abduction of Baby Adrian. Adrian is the infant son of millionaires, from what her father left her, Catherine Hainey Mitchelson.Being snatched right out of his crib when his nanny Josianne turned her back for a brief moment Adrian is suspected to have been kidnapped by his father, the estranged husband of Catherine, Victor Mitchelson. Victor claiming his innocence is taken into custody despite that he can't produce Adrian or where he's, if in fact he kidnapped him, being kept.With Simon coming, at the insistence of his nagging teenage daughter Olivia, on the scene he's treated as dirt if not worse by both Catherine and her not so stable sister Claire as nothing more then a greedy and unethical ambulance chaser. Simon in fact is really interested in finding Baby Adrian more then writing an exploitive book about the crime that's has now become the biggest story on the West Coast. Simon is both sick and tired in waiting true crime stories and is only doing this, his investigation of the Baby Adrian kidnapping, as a favor to his good friend in the L.A Police Department the by now helplessly drunk lady Police Inspector Strong.As Simon suspected Victor is found to be completely innocent, by the LA District Attorney, in his sons Adrian's kidnapping and released from prison. In Victor knowing too much about who was really responsible in his sons Adrians kidnapping he ends up paying the ultimate price: His Life. Victor was gunned down by an unseen assailant as he was sitting in his office. The killer also leaves a suicide note but it's, Victor's phony suicide & note, so sloppy that no one, the LAPD or the L.A DA's office, believes that he really killed himself.Soon Simon, in his crime solving expertise, starts to close in on who's behind not only Baby Adrain's kidnapping but also Victor's murder. Simon starts to zeros in on the Mitchelson family friend and personal lawyer Henry Stokes who seems to know more about this baffling case then he's letting out. Stokes, the man with the secrets, has a good idea to who's behind Victor's killing that's somehow connected with the Baby Adrian kidnapping but soon ends up himself murdered the same way Victor was. With a bullet in his head as he was sitting in his office and a suicide note by his killer planted at the murder scene!Simon who was to see Stokes that very morning is now implicated, Stokes killing or staged suicide was as sloppily executed as that of Victors, in his murder. Finding very explosive evidence in Stokes office, after he was gunned down, that leads to who's behind both his and Victors murders, as well as baby Adrian's kidnapping, Simon is now in danger of being murdered himself in him knowing too much.Wild and really crazy final with Simon confronting who's behind all these unexplainable, until Simon figured them out, crimes in the movie as the killer, by now totally and murderously insane, attempts to murder him. The fact that Simon took the killer's gun away from him didn't help much with Simon, who seemed to have trouble keeping focus, turning his back on him. This had the very alert killer grab his gun back and then in a life and death struggle shoot Simon in the leg! Just when we, and Simon, thought that this is the end, in Simon getting gunned down and killed, we get the biggest surprise in the movie and it doesn't at all, since it was a foregone conclusion in the first place, have to do with the killers identity.
rsoonsa
This reviewer makes a point of stressing at least one praiseworthy element within each film under discussion, no matter how dreadful the overall work may be, but such becomes an enormously formidable task in this instance, as nothing springs to mind largely due to an execrably written script, marrowless direction, quaintly inappropriate cinematography, flawed post-production efforts, specially relative to the sound track, while even the production and set designing calls undue notice to itself. Shot principally in Montreal for Canadian television distribution, its video title an awkward THE TRUTH ABOUT LYING, the film features John Ritter as Simon Barker, an alcoholic true crime writer of whom it has been discovered that he is highly competent in investigative matters, and is therefore utilized to assist in solving homicides that are apparently too complex for the capabilities of the local metropolitan police department's homicide unit, under the supervision of Simon's sister "Inspector Strong" (Samantha Eggar), also a sot, with Barker constructing a best-seller based upon his findings after the resolution of each case, and allotting a percentage of his book income to his sister, because the literary exposition of the crime solving obviously warrants that degree of reader fascination necessary to gather a loyal and well-paying coterie of followers. The crime at hand is, however, not initially one involving murder, but rather kidnapping of an infant (multiple killings to follow) and Simon is soon fraternizing with the kidnap victim's highly dysfunctional family, consisting of a pair of sisters, each hampered by the other's sharing the physical attentions from the husband of one of them, while at the same time Barker attempts to mend his marital breakup, with his teenaged daughter urging him to do so (a typically uneven aspect of the production is a striking visual dissimilitude between blood relatives). The work, therefore, becomes encased within a framework of psychodrama that includes Simon's rather cursory struggle with alcoholism, his efforts to regain the esteem of his former wife in the face of her dismay that he is possibly placing his daughter's life in jeopardy by permitting her to accompany him to crime scenes, the hatred between the contentious sisters over the desired husband (Tony Nardi) along with the latter's endeavours to find a balance between his wife and mistress, the whereabouts of the ofttimes overlooked kidnapped child (played, dependent upon baby behaviour, by triplets), a hopelessly inept and drunken police official and, adding to the mix, the family attorney to the sisters (Roddy McDowall) who has secrets of his own (that are never disclosed). Unfortunately, another item not revealed within the narrative is the identity of the person responsible for one of the slayings, a characteristic drawback of this movie that, in spite of a potentially ingratiating cast of Canadian and American players, falls prey to the script's overage of red herrings, most of which are as telegraphed as is the frequently pretentious dialogue. During one sequence, a character is shot to death while seated at his desk from several feet off, a round penetrating his chest, by an anonymous gloved assassin, who then places the weapon next the victim. In a remarkable subsequent scene, it is disclosed that the police forensic lab has provided hardly startling information that "the angle" of the wound indicates that the death could not have been by suicide! Michele Scarabelli, who is cast as one of the skirmishing sisters, is a natural and skilled actress but she, in addition to Daphne Zuniga (the other sister), Eggar and McDowall, patently lack strong directoral oversight here while Ritter, an able and flexible player, staunchly wades through his scenes, doing his best as also do most of the other actors as they mouth their predictable lines. The accomplished Nardi is unaccountably cursed during his most important scenes with jittery hand-held camera silliness that obviates any attempt he might have made to create his role. All in all, this is a misfire from its outset. Allan Goldstein, who has directed with refinement upon occasion during his career, is seemingly defeated by a woefully written screenplay.
