The 1994 made-for-TV movie Deadly Vows opens with a football game.

It’s just a friendly football game in the park.  The majority of the players appear to be frat boys.  They’re muscular and athletic and they play hard but they’re not professional athletes.  However, there is one player that sticks out.  Tom Weston (Gerald McRaney) is taking the game very seriously and he is determined to win.  He continually begs his team’s quarterback to throw him the ball.  When he’s tackled, he staggers back up and run back to the huddle, even though he’s limping and out-of-breath.  Again, Tom is taking the game very seriously.  Tom is also nearly twenty years older than the other players.

Tom is desperate to prove that he can still keep up with the young guys around him, even though it’s obvious that he can’t.  Tom also drives a truck for a living and spends his time on his CB radio, bragging about how good he is at his job and trying to pick fights with anyone who he feels doesn’t treat him with enough respect.  Incidentally, Tom is not driving a big truck.  He’s driving a small truck.  It’s actually more of a van than a truck…..

In other words, Tom is having a midlife crisis.

I think everyone either knows or has, at least, come across someone like Tom Weston.  He’s the balding, forty-something guy who brags about how he’s in the best shape of his life and who shamelessly flirts with every young woman that he sees, despite the fact that he’s married to a woman his own age, Nancy (Peggy Lipton).  Nancy, for her part, tries to be understanding.  Like a lot of insecure men, Tom is a very active gaslighter.  Indeed, when Nancy first meets Bobbi (Josie Bisset), she believes Tom when he says that Bobbi is just a friend.  Of course, the truth of the matter is that Tom is having an affair and he even married Bobbi a few weeks earlier.  Tom’s not just a guy having a mid-life crisis.  He’s also a bigamist.  And eventually, he’s a murderer.

Deadly Vows is based on the true story of Robert Harnois, a man who is currently in prison for murdering one wife and trying to kill the other.  When this film was made, Harnois had not yet been convicted of the murder which is why the character’s name was changed to Tom Weston.  The film itself is slightly ambiguous as to the circumstances that led to the murder.  While we see Tom reading about it in prison and smirking, we don’t actually see him taking the contract out on the victim’s life.  But, in a safely made-for-TV style, it’s pretty clearly implied that Tom hired someone to carry out the murder.  (And, in real life, that’s exactly what happened.)

Deadly Vows is, in many ways, a typical made-for-TV true crime film.  What sets it apart from other entries in the genre is Gerald McRaney’s chilling performance as Tom Weston.  McRaney plays Weston as the type of sociopath who thinks that he can charm his way out of any situation.  Instead, most people can see right through him and his manipulative bluster.  Indeed, the film portrays Tom as being a very stupid and pathetic man.  Unfortunately, one doesn’t have to be smart to hurt other people.  Peggy Lipton and especially Josie Bisset both give good performance as well but this film is ultimately dominated by McRaney’s performance as a murderous loser who simply cannot accept that he’s not 22 anymore.