Jessalyn Gilsig | Through the Shattered Lens

Is this Canadian film from 2018 called The Sweetheart or Dating a Sociopath?

It depends on where you first saw it.

When it was on Netflix, it was called The Sweetheart. However, when the film recently aired on Lifetime, the title had been changed to Dating A Sociopath. We all know how much Lifetime loves to change titles and, in this case, I think they made the right move. Dating A Sociopath just has a certain punch to it that The Sweetheart lacks. The Sweetheart makes it sound like this is a film about one of those old women who always has 60 year-old candy sitting in a glass jar. Whereas Dating A Sociopath tells you pretty much everything that you need to know about the film.

The sociopath of the title is Brian (John Cor), who is a personal trainer who apparently has a nice side gig going where he seduces wealthy women, spends all of their money, and murders them. John Cor does a pretty good job of playing Brian, turning up the charm even while he’s doing some of the worst things imaginable. As played by Cor, you can understand just how exactly Brian has managed to be such a successful con artist. There’s also a great scene in which a jewelry store employee attempts to blackmail Brian and Brian responds not with the expected violence but instead by precisely explaining everything that he will do to the employee if he doesn’t keep quiet. In this scene, Brian is both charismatic and dangerous and scary as Hell.

Brian’s latest target is Samantha (Jessalyn Gilsig), who is currently separated from her well-meaning but alcoholic husband. Samantha thinks that Brian is the best but her oldest daughter, Jane (Hannah Vandenbygaart), is immediately suspicious of him Of course, Jane has problems of her own to deal with. Thanks to her father’s lack of sobriety and basic driving skills, Jane has a broken leg and is forced to spend most of the movie hopping around on either crutches or using a cane. Making things even worse for Jane is the fact that Brian keeps messing with her medication, the better to keep Jane in constant pain and to also fool everyone into thinking that she’s become a pill-popping drug addict.

And I have to say that, as someone who has broken her ankle on multiple occasions and who knows just how Hellish the healing process can be without painkillers, nothing made me dislike Brian more than those scenes where he would sneak into Jane’s room and switch out her medication while she was sleeping. I mean, if I didn’t already know it from the title, those scenes would be all the proof that I needed to know that Brian was a sociopath. At the same time, those scenes also firmly put me on Jane’s side. By the time Jane finally stood up for herself and started her own investigation into Brian’s past, I was ready to jump and cheer.

Dating A Sociopath is a pretty entertaining Lifetime film, even if it wasn’t originally made for Lifetime. John Cor and Hannah Vandenbygaart are both well-cast in the two most important roles and if nothing else, the film will encourage anyone to think twice before dating a sociopath. Even a charming one.

This is the second Hallmark movie in row I’ve watched where a woman in expensive clothes falls in mud. Why? I guess if kids can beatbox in R.L. Stine’s Monsterville: The Cabinet Of Souls, then this movie can also fall back really tired and old things such as rich peopling falling in mud.

That butt belongs to real estate agent Julie Sterling (Jessalyn Gilsig). This movie was made in 2012 and was meant to commemorate 100 years of the Girl Scouts. This movie doesn’t even try to give an excuse for Sterling to get involved with the Girl Scouts. Her boss played by Patricia Richardson just shows up in her office, says a girl scout troop needs a leader, and that she has to go be it for 90 days. End of story. I like it when a Hallmark movie doesn’t bullshit, but just says, this is a thing that’s happening, so onward with the movie. The Gourmet Detective: A Healthy Place To Die did that too.

Julie may not be good with kids, but she does come prepared with a purse big enough to hold a severed head in it. As I’m sure you already know, she isn’t assigned the “good” girl scouts, but the ones who really need help. Kind of like herself. Bailee Madison plays one of the scouts and once again she is cast just to be super cute.

While she is working with the scouts she is also trying to sell a house. That part is really just a barometer so we can tell at what stage in her character arc she is based on how her professional life is affected by her time with the kids. Also, it’s how she runs into a handy man played by Ty Olsson who kind of reminded me of tech journalist Patrick Norton. Only with more hair.

His performance really is the highlight of this film. Of course he is also the father of Bailee Madison’s character. He’s nice, he doesn’t act zany, he cares about his daughter, etc. He’s the best part of the movie.

Since the Girl Scouts are probably best known for their cookies. The end of the film becomes her troop facing off against the best scouts to sell the most cookies. The scenes where they are fighting each other in street for sales by changing their deal every few seconds till they finally capture the crowd are the majority of these parts. I wish they had cut some of the unnecessary adapting scenes such as the mud part and given us some scenes of her doing the work that the scouts are supposed to be doing. Instead, we get a brief flash of her coming out of a Kinkos type place and then the kids are complaining about her doing everything for them. Would have been nice if they had shown that rather than just telling us it happened.

Honestly, what this movie did for me is remind me of why I enjoyed watching Troop Beverly Hills (1989) as a kid. However, there is one last thing to mention and that is that for once in a long time, the romance part really takes a back seat to the stuff with the scouts. Yes, she warms up to the father and we can see that they are good friends and are going to see where that takes them, but it’s not forced down our throats. He never proposes at the end or anything. The end is her realizing that her boss has helped make her a better person by giving her these 90 days with the girls and that she would like to continue doing it.