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Amanda and John adopt a gorgeous baby girl from Europe. After years of angst and disappointment, they finally adopt the baby they had dreamed about. But something is not quite right and after a short time they uncover shocking, scary and possibly life threatening secrets about how the baby actually came to them.

Emmanuelle Vaugier in Stolen Child (2012)

Stolen Child-And Baby Makes Heartbreak ****

This film made for television showed up recently on a cable channel. It works as a documentary with a message. Young couples, as the ones at the center of this story having gone through expensive procedures in order to conceive, will resort to adopting a baby as their last resort. They both understand how their lives are about to change after they decide to go through with getting the adorable baby from Romania who will be theirs, much sooner than they thought. The agency in charge of the adoption made it so easy, something that would have been a signal to realize not everything was legal. After finding inconsistencies in little Eva&#39;s papers, Amanda, the young teacher goes to the police. Her suspicions are confirmed with the arrival of the mysterious man that keeps tailing her wherever she goes. He has a reason for doing that. In most cases, would be parents have no idea what they are getting into by resorting to unscrupulous agencies with only one thing in mind: to make a profit out of the illegal traffic of infants from poor countries. Michael Feifer, the director, a busy man in show business, understood in how to present the material in a clear way for all audiences to understand the work of criminal minds playing with the hearts of vulnerable couples whose only desire is to give their love to children they could not conceive.

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Stolen Child

I don&#39;t know if this movie debuted on the Lifetime Network, but I watched it on that channel last night. Emmanuelle Vaugier and Scott Elrod star as the pretty-as-a-picture couple who adopt a child after failing to give birth to one of their own, only to find, in Lifetime fashion, that &quot;Things Aren&#39;t As They Seem&quot;. Mix together some generic Eastern European characters as heavies, a chase through a mostly-empty building that is ridiculously over-sized for an adoption agency, and &quot;I&#39;m-only-doing-this-for-the-paycheck&quot; performances, and you get the idea. For fans of Ms. Vaugier and movies that require extreme suspension of disbelief.

This is not a great movie by any means. It will do if you need something to watch and you haven&#39;t seen it. I found the acting on the leading lady&#39;s part to be a little under the weather. I know this was based on a true story, but I never understood quite why she was so darned suspicious after one doctor made one comment about the child&#39;s weight and how at her age she should weigh more. If a child was supposedly malnourished before being adopted, wouldn&#39;t that explain things? Sure, she was right to worry, but to be so over-the-top suspicious didn&#39;t make much sense at that point. It was mentioned about how the baby didn&#39;t look like the adoptive parents by some kids in the woman&#39;s classroom where she teaches. These kids looked at least nine, you mean to tell me that they couldn&#39;t figure out that the baby must be adopted and that&#39;s why she never told them she was pregnant again? This isn&#39;t even the early 1980&#39;s, kids that big don&#39;t behave the way her students did in these times. They acted like they were supposed to be about five maybe six, but looked too old. Also, the baby sure didn&#39;t look like the birth mother either. I guess she takes after the father? I also didn&#39;t understand why it took so long for the FBI to enter the adoption agency after they swore that they would be right there. A crazy man was able to chase the leading lady around with a knife for a good five minutes before any agent appeared. The adoption man had time to shred documents. At one point the agents were behind him yelling Stop! Freeze! He kept running, and you never once saw them or heard footsteps giving chase. He made it to the roof and you still never saw them. It seemed like they had a tape recorder on and no real actors for that scene.

This movie deals with a very important issue, but at the same time makes the viewer tired to talk about the subject anymore. First of all, the director certainly doesn&#39;t know his geography. Typically American to know nothing about the world outside of the States. They talk about Chisinau, which is in Moldova. Yet, the phone is answered in Spanish, and &#39;Amanda&#39; then says something in Italian! Also, the birth certificate is in German, which is not spoken in Moldova. But that is not the worst aspect of this movie. The whole thing is simplistic. Corners are cut everywhere, which makes the storyline sound like it was written by a twelve-year-old. Furthermore, the acting was horrible. &#39;John&#39; was obviously just put in there to be pretty, because he can&#39;t act at all. &#39;Amanda&#39; was a little better, but still not at professional level. &#39;Tatiana&#39; seemed to have been taken right out of a children&#39;s movie of very poor quality. The only one who could be a tiny bit credible is &#39;Amanda&#39;s father&#39;. The rest of the actors were abysmal. The scenes that were supposed to give the viewer a certain emotion were too fake to do their work. I had no emotion with this movie except frustration with the bad script and the bad acting. And I am someone who starts bawling with the first hint of emotion in a movie.

The storyline is weak and so many parts seem unnecessary. The acting is not good. The main character never even asked the uncle of the child she adopted how he even found out about the agency, tracked them and what they&#39;re doing, etc. It seems like this guy is pretty smart for figuring all that out and is shown being cautious knowing that he&#39;s dealing with dangerous people but then when he is approached at his hotel room, at night, by a guy claiming to be from his home country claiming to know him but basically, a stranger and he proceeds to turn his back on him and is letting him come into the hotel room which results in his death, so dumb. I&#39;m sorry but the part when main character asks the hotel staff to allow her to enter a room because she left her purse and hotel card in the room would never allow a guest into the room without first having some type of identification, i.e. Name and phone number on file, the manager recognizing them as the person who rented that room, etc. To verify that it is indeed their room, DUMB. When the main character has a meeting with another mother who adopted from the same agency and tries to explain to the woman about her suspicions about what the agency&#39;s been doing as far as stealing people&#39;s babies to sell on the baby-black-market and the heartless woman basically says even if that is true and if it makes me her a bad person then she really doesn&#39;t care. I guess we&#39;re just supposed to show people at their worst? I don&#39;t know how anyone could feel all right knowing that a mother and father had their child taken away from them and the parents are always wondering if the child is okay, if it&#39;s even alive, not knowing and always worrying and then you have the person who says they don&#39;t care and can live with that type of knowledge, well I think that&#39;s a pretty horrible type of person. I would have reported her to the FBI, hopefully after they took down that agency they went through each of the adoptions and tried to reunite children with their parents, irregardless of adoption because it was done illegally. Even though this movie is trying to tackle a serious subject and a problem that exists in real life the flaws in this movie, the excruciating flow from scene to scene and the poor acting really bring this movie down as a whole and I feel like I wasted my time.

Excellent film detailing the pitfalls of dealing with a foreign agency&#39;s adoption agency. They were in business of kidnapping children, bringing them to the U.S. and using fronts as adoption agencies for unsuspecting American would-be parents. One couple immediately saw that something was wrong due to several discrepancies in the paper work. Despite the husband&#39;s protests to leave things be, the wife pursued this and found out what was going on. While the story was an excellent one with an exciting ending, a sidebar story could have been when the woman, a teacher in California, was only given a two week leave of absence for child rearing. Evidently, the district she worked in treated adoption differently than rather child birth. Sounds like something the N.Y.C.&#39;s Department of Education would do under our current mayor. It was good seeing that laws have been enacted that will avoid such misfit agencies.

User reviews

Stolen Child

The adoption

Another helping of Lifetime silliness

Just OK

Bad script, bad acting

Frustrating

Stolen Child-And Baby Makes Heartbreak ****

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