THE FRIEND ZONE
2023's My Best Friend the Baby Snatcher is a Lifetime flick in which the antagonist uses poisonous tea to get her kill on. "Baby Snatcher" is also a Lawrence brothers pic so you know that its savagery will certainly be in nasty taste. "Nothing else matters to me more than this baby". Uh-oh, pseudo momma bear is on the prowl.
Directed by Andrew Lawrence and starring his bro Matthew Lawrence (naturally), My Best Friend the Baby Snatcher is about two besties who get preggo at the same time. Here's the rub: one of them miscarries and then goes off the rails trying to take possession of the other's would-be tyke. In truth, it took me a while to figure what the heck was up with the gist of "Baby Snatcher". I mean I initially thought there was some sort of surrogate stuff going on here.
So yeah, helmer Andrew Lawrence is no spring chicken. He knows where to put the camera and can certainly give his viewers the veritable heebie-jeebies. Even so, his "Baby Snatcher" gets lost in a murky plot, where some kind of capable editing and/or story-boarding was needed. Sure his actors are game (Jennifer Taylor, Paul London, Lawrence) but they're lost in a fiddly "hand that doesn't really rock the cradle" (if you know what I mean).
OK, so why are the two couples friends even though they mildly bounce off each other like passing ships? And why does the bad mom character suffocate the good mom and then in the next clip she's alive while tied up in the basement (huh?)? And why does the bad mom go cray cray without a point A to point B nous? Finally, why are there flashbacks presented at odd times that fail to move the diegesis along? These are some of the questions I asked myself and concentrated more on them than caring if every Waspy suburbanite made it out alive. Fair-weather "friend".
Written by Jesse Burleson