Simply A Masterpiece

Don't listen to the negative reviews

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Blistering performances.

Katlin Palmerston (Elisha Cuthbert) is a math-whiz high school student from a middle class home. She starts gambling to save up for an European trip with best friend Cheryl. She takes money from the girls at poker and the boys with football. She even sets up her own betting pool. With a run of bad luck and bad bets, she is in deep trouble. Popular girl Janice's sketchy brother Ron Lunderman sets up a poker game. Katlin wins big and starts dating Ron. The computer gambling continues and everything spirals out of control. She borrows from the wrong couple and they have a creepy way to settle the debt. Her mother (Sherry Miller) rides to the rescue.This is very much a lesson-filled movie of the week. It's basic and overtly dramatic. There is an inevitability to the plot. Elisha Cuthbert is what shines in this movie. She shows her beauty and her charisma. She's also young enough and pretty close to the 17 year old character. It helps to make it more real and visceral. The last act is quite creepy and unforgettable. It would help to have more original twists but this is strictly a "very special episode" of whatever teen soap.

I have to say that I did enjoy this movie. I have only seen Elisha Cuthbert in one other role which didn't impress me. Here, she was stellar. Her performance carried this movie with ample assistance from her wise and loving mother, Sherrie Miller (Valerie).It seemed credible that this gifted and intelligent "teenager" was drawn to gambling as a way to use her gifts to acquire (I won't say earn) money for her European adventure. As she gradually became obsessed with the next big payoff, it became clear that this was more than an obsession: it was a disease.My issue with the denouement was that Katlin (Cuthbert) received a very light sentence for her transgressions (rehab and return to school and no European trip). Wow, that was painful! She harmed a LOT of people in addition to harming herself. It is, of course, necessary to receive treatment for this addiction as it is for drug, alcohol, or any other addiction.It is also necessary to perform restitution for all the harm that she has engendered. The very end of the film shows that not only did she escape any serious punishment, but she apparently is going to "game the system" and use her intelligence to indulge her passion, regardless of any consequences (there may be none). Rather than being a sympathetic character, she becomes someone you might like to smack in the face a couple of times and then walk away. And I believe that this is exactly what the film makers wished to say.

I don't see how you could like Elisha Cuthbert and not want to see this.Don't read any further unless you hate Cuthbert and wouldn't see it if you didn't like great stories. "Cuthbert won the 2001 Gemini (Canadian television awards) for best actress in a dramatic program or mini-series and Sherry Miller, who plays her mother, won the Gemini for best supporting actress." Both well deserved. This was among the best Canadian made-for-TV movies I've seen - up there with "Human Cargo", "Prairie Giant", "Trudeau", all of which had big budgets and over four hours to tell their great stories, and drew on true life stranger than fiction).This movie had a small budget. What it did have, was Elisha Cuthbert, whose expressive face dominates the film, and rightfully so, since it's the ebbs and flows of her optimism and despair that we're following as she (spoiler follows!) becomes a gambling addict. The vulnerability of smart kids who think they're invulnerable, the easy links from mildly illegal football pools to more illegal organized house poker parties to taking pills and then hanging out in quite illegal after-hours casinos, were all made without preaching. At each stage you want her to get out and it's hard not to yell "get out!" at the screen, because Cuthbert is never unsympathetic or stupid. She's always almost out of the situation and trying to get wholly out of it, is what gets her in deeper trouble.I found her parents' behaviour especially effective dramatically and believable. Not only Sherry Miller, who gets the best "mom" part I've seen in any TV movie, and who deals with each situation appropriately and decisively, but the hedge-fund-manager Dad who understands gambling as a process intellectually but isn't there emotionally enough to help his daughter deal with its psychological effects. These are believable suburban parents for a character like Cuthbert's Kaitlin, who's not at all "spoiled" but does feel she's got a lot of rope before she hangs... all of which she uses. The affair with her 22-year-old boyfriend also makes perfect sense - he's a coward when dealing with the loan shark, and also with her, and even with her mother - though he obviously is the one who makes the whole house of cards fall in on the shark in the end.It's real hard not to cheer when Mom takes down the creepy pornographer who's threatening to "tear her family apart". I like that she goes back specifically to do it. You get a real sense of the mama-bear pushed to the edge to protect her cub. Though technically the loan shark Blair is not the guy who caused her daughter's dilemma (she owns it, completely), he does make a nice side character demonstrating how awful it is to live in Toronto suburbs. Yup, those are your neighbours in Markham, folks. I liked how ordinary the couple was, and how they were obviously turned on by the power they gained over young girls with the loan shark game - obvious sociopaths who make your skin crawl. Just like real suburbs! I rate this a 9 because of what it managed to do on such a low budget - you get RIGHT into the head of a gambling addict and you're THERE with her through the worst of it - becoming a slave of sociopaths in Markham or Surrey or wherever that was.

If this is Canada's equivalent of a Lifetime movie......then the USA is in big trouble.You have to see this one to believe it, and love it - possibly the best good girl gone bad flick I have seen since Showgirls. Yes, it is just that cheesy.As for the acting, it's all good, believable, maybe a bit too much so for American viewers used to seeing Valerie Bertinelli or Jaclyn Smith heaving heavy remorseful sighs for their sins and/or more likely role decisions, but a hell of a lot better than that McCleod's Brood crap or made for Lifetime garbage that is shown daily on those wimmin's pics channels of late.And above all, this one has something no other movie of this genre has had now or since, so don't read on if you don't want the best part spoiled! SPOILER coming! Mom beats up the bad guy - You got to love it.