Attorney Cuts
Everything is going well for Carrie Evans (Willa Ford - The Nurse); she has a good job as an attorney, she has a handsome boyfriend, she is close to her father and also gets on well with her boss, Caswell Foxx (Daniel Hugh Kelly - Devil May Call), who puts her in charge of a case defending a big oil company. But a chain of events including receiving pictures of her undressing and an encounter with environmentalist, Greg Giorna (Aidan Bristow - Suspicion), leads to her secretly looking into other cases involving the oil company and her boss. It leads to her discovering suspicious activities of her ambitious boss who Greg believes is the one guilty of sending her those photos.
Where to start when it comes to "A Father's Secret"? Well I could mention that it has an alternative title as it is also known as "Hunt for Truth". Or with this being a TV movie I could mention that there is a typical side as we have the attractive, career minded Carrie doing some snooping and ending up in danger due to what she discovers. I could also mention that the story, despite working to a formula, has some interesting ideas when it comes to various developments including Carrie discovering things about her family she never knew, which predictably turn her own world upside down. But the thing I must mention is that despite some nice ideas "A Father's Secret" doesn't flow and it constantly feels like a series of rushed scenes tossed together with nothing to really link them together, making it feel like it constantly jumps, missing parts of the story out.
This sense of being in a constant rush is a negative when it comes to "A Father's Secret" and that sense of rushing causes another when it comes to the acting. Now for me the acting through out "A Father's Secret" is not that great with a lot of the cast playing up to the camera and over playing their characters, making their physical responses too forced but the rushed sense of each scene makes this feel 10 times worse. On top of that there is very little depth to any of these characters and that again causes issues as does the dialogue which often lacks that sense of being natural.
What this all boils down to is that "A Father's Secret" ends up a below par TV movie and one which is mainly undone by a sense that a storyline was hacked down to a collection of scenes which in turn have a rushed feel.
