Daddy's Perfect Little Girl 2021 * * 1/2 Stars

WHO'S NOT YOUR DADDY

"There's something very wrong with that little girl". Uh huh. We're talking being surrounded by a SWAT team with rifles wrong. 

Anyway, 2021's Daddy's Perfect Little Girl is my latest review. It's title, well it couldn't be more of an oxymoron if it tried. Daddy's Perfect Little Girl is about a young preteen who becomes jealous of her adoptive father's new girlfriend and her basketball-playing son. The girl in question (Ella played by Hattie Kragten) resorts to murder, manipulation, and all out attention grabbing to drive the diegesis of the movie. You know Ella is a little off literally within the two-minute mark. She's what you call a "brat-a-tat-tat" or a daddy nightmare albatross.

"Perfect" is a character study that's sledgehammered for a good two hours (with commercials). It's Lifetime poster child (no pun intended) with Kragten diving into the role of Ella as if the world was her egocentric oyster. Her dad's persona is completely oblivious, her neighbor is a mean-spirited goof, her Schwinn Elm bike gets a lot of mileage, and her best friend Kinsley (Ajanae Stephenson) acts as a Greek chorus to give Ella up for her wrongdoings. Ella doesn't need fatherly advice mind you. She needs to be put in an institution stat (which happens in the end, sort of).

Daddy's Perfect Little Girl minus its binding production values, is a sort of gender-reversed version of 1993's The Good Son (remember that Macaulay Culkin thriller?). It gets the job done from a narrative standpoint (barely) and yeah, Kragten is committed to her part. You as the viewer, feel no commiseration for Ella and I suppose that's the point. Still, why does "Perfect" project camp when it could exercise a little more depth. I figured it's Lifetime's fault for not fleshing out the anemic script more. Yup, not so "perfect".  

Written by Jesse Burleson