User Reviews

I don't think I really have any major spoilers in this review, but to be on the safe side I have given a warning--as perhaps someone who has not seen the film might not want to know even this much in advance.

This film is definitely a modern day tale--with a single, unmarried mother with a young son, struggling to try to meet the bills.

The story actually starts out pretty good.

Gwen works for an ins. agency, she has a mother she considers too controlling, a best female friend at the office, and she's trying to better herself by taking an on-line real estate course. In the meantime, she can't meet her mortgage. However, she refuses to consider selling the house and moving into something she could actually afford. How she was ever able to afford such an affluent house in the first place remains a mystery.

Then one day, out of the blue, she has a flat tire and this nice looking man happens along and changes the tire for her. Soon they're involved in a romance. Only he isn't who he seems, neither is another character in the storyline.

The problem is the writer gets a little too clever with the tale and it ends up being rather unbelievable. We also have no way out for the heroine beyond the villain spilling their guts--which I've always considered to be weak writing.

We also conveniently manage to come up with a new, albeit sudden romance for the heroine by the end of the film.

4 stars

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.

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.

If there were ever a profile of the quintessential victim, it would have to be Gwendolyn Griffith. The single mom of the little boy Alec still has nightmares about her ex-boyfriend, a married man named Jake who physically attacked her for getting pregnant. She defended herself with a baseball bat, and she was the one who was arrested. Jake later died was while driving drunk. Gwendolyn even lost her father when she was seven. He also was driving drunk and hit a pole.

Now, Gwendolyn faces a new dilemma when she begins a relationship with a man who claims to work in pharma. Actually, he is the pastor of the Faith Neighborhood Church in a suburb of Houston. Reverend Ed Baker is working in cahoots with a confederate, setting up Gwendolyn to take the fall for the murder of Ed's wife Kelly, an heiress who is worth millions.

After Kelly is murdered and Gwendolyn is arrested, the media anoints her with the appellation "the preacher's mistress." In fact, she has been duped by her co-worker Sidney, who turns out be Ed's confederate. Sidney spent four years locating and getting cozy with Gwendolyn because Sidney is the vindictive sister of Jake, whose death she blames on her friend.

The filmmakers were successful with some snappy dialogue and a well-developed set of characters. It is especially Gwendolyn's mother, Ellen, who was memorable as the voice of reason, who suspected Ed from the outset. While the climactic scene turned into a nearly farcical romp in the parking garage with the characters running in circles around an SUV, there was finally a sense of redemption for the Queen of All Victims, Miss Gwendolyn Griffith. In the kind private eye, David Wyatt, there was even the sense that Gwendolyn had finally met Mr. Right.