In a Stranger's Hand (1991)

Don't Believe the Hype

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I watched In a Stranger's Hand before Shakma on Christmas eve and enjoyed it. I remember when I first watched this on Lifetime and Shakma on either Showtime, HBO, or Cinamax after I graduated from highschool. This was the first movie that I became familiar with Brett Cullen and then was Prehysteria, Complex of Fear, and Apollo 13. Plus, I like watching Megan Gallagher and others too.

I've commented on a lot of big-screen films, but this is the first TV movie I've commented on and there's a reason. It's one of the few that I still take time to watch when it comes on today. They usually show it on Lifetime nowadays b/c I guess it is seen as some sort of 'female' movie. I saw it when it first came out in the late 80s and have always liked it. It contains IMHO the best performance of the late Robert Urich's career. And I liked him in just about everything he did.Urich plays Jack Bauer (that's right!) a successful, normal, rather average computer executive who seemingly has the quintessential life: a great job, a woman he loves, money, and a group of co-workers and employees who adore him. But there's a kind of emptiness and loneliness about him. Bauer used to be a promising football player in college, but he blew his knee out and it killed his dream of playing pro. Bauer is big and burly-looking on the surface, but he's really a pussycat (he wears glasses, is very polite and professional, and rather nerdy). It's amazing that the man who played tough guys Dan Tanna on Vegas and Spenser (what the hell was his first name?) on Spenser for Hire can be so utterly convincing as a nerdy computer geek, but he pulls it off.The movie is about a poor, working-class waitress whose little girl has been kidnapped and she has been posting flyers of her daughter's photo around town. The woman is played by Megan Gallagher, an actress I remember quite well from the 80s who had always played more sexpot type characters. But here she is cast against type and is very effective as an ordinary (but still quite attractive) single mom.Bauer sees the girl on subway (with another woman that he mistakes for her mother) and notices the flyer also after she disappears and when girl leaves her doll, he tries to get it to her. Social services makes him think the girl has been found, so when he tries to return it, the real mother has him arrested thinking he knows about the kidnapping. Everything is straightened out immediately, but b/c Bauer is the only one who has seen her daughter, she enlists his help to find her. After a series of confrontations, he reluctantly agrees.This movie is just one that I like to watch whenever it comes on. It is primarily a mystery, but also it has elements of social class divisions (Bauer is successful, the waitress is not), the opposites-attract theory between Bauer and the waitress, and 2 characters that the viewer really likes, gets to know, and root for. Mainly, I liked the fact that they never forgot about the prime mission of these 2 people: to find the little girl before it was too late. But I still wanted them to get together in the end. Yet I think the ending was well done and appropriate. I know that Robert Urich was not some big shot Hollywood A-lister or even the biggest TV actor, but I always remember liking him in virtually everything he did. And this is the best thing he ever did for me.REST IN PEACE MR. URICH.

Classic. If you're into bad early 90's 'made for TV' movies. This one involves a child that vanishes. I had trouble paying attention (I have ADD) and combining attention defecit disorder with a bad early 90's TV movie makes for a rough situation.It's awful. No two if ands it's or buts about it. But, if you laugh at horrible lines and a plot that any mildy intelligent person can pick apart within the first ten minutes, then this is for you. I have trouble giving a vote on this, because although being awful as it so obviously was, I was sickly drawn into watching it unfold. Like a book I've read 20 times, I knew every 'twist' and 'turn' involved. There weren't many to begin with, but a slow plot can sometimes be refreshing.

In a film made for television, Robert Urich portrays Jack Bauer, a comfortable corporate executive in the field of computer software manufacturing who unwillingly finds himself amidst an attempt to locate a missing girl whose photograph upon a poster he viewed in a subway, along with the child herself and her apparent kidnapper, after Jack is excluded from access to his automobile that is locked inside of a parking garage following a late work meeting, requiring him to use a public mode of transport. When he returns a doll dropped by the little girl, Carla, to her distressed mother Laura (Megan Gallagher), the latter pleads for his assistance with such fervour that, alien as such altruistic activity is to him, he reluctantly joins with her in a persistent attempt to find Carla, whereupon the pair discover that a rash of similar kidnappings is occurring throughout their city and soon Jack and Laura are privy to knowledge of a conspiracy involving selling of children. Despite reliance in the screenplay upon melodrama, continuity issues are few and a great deal of the dialogue is quite realistic and made even more so by skillful performances from cast members, notably the talented Gallagher, as well as from Urich, Isabella Hofmann, and Christine Dunford who contributes a topflight turn as a lady of the evening coerced into a child vending operation. Production values are pleasingly strong for the piece that is ably directed by David Greene to create an atmosphere of suspense with a dash of humour and a delightfully ambiguous ending, and the work also profits from an appropriate score from Peter Manning Robinson, burnished cinematography of Stevan Larner, and adroit set design by Steve Legner, all to the end of creating a film wherein attention to details generally counters well any clichés.