tinaShay's review about The Act(2019)

tinaShay

Rating 10

10:20 18 October, 2023

It's about letting go after struggling to escape and distorted love that gotta be broken free, and about losing control and the distortions between growth and relationships. Against the backdrop of an already intriguing real event, Patricia Arquette, who continues to challenge herself, and Joey King, who is transforming her image as a actress, have created an extraordinary chemistry that makes this show not simply a rehash of a case like other "true-crime" dramas, but rather turns it into a intense collision of hatred, sacrifice and vitality with their superior acting skills, making them the "best mother-daughter team" onscreen in recent years. The addition of two fictional characters, "Lacey" and "Mel", as another mother-daughter team, further enhances the appeal of this show. It turns the mere musings of this famous social news into a realistic fable on the nightmare of blood family and familial ties, which send a shiver down my spine and make me struggle to breathe.

This drama sucks! The scriptwriters and director keep looking at a mentally abused child from God's perspective, always thinking the child should fight back, but since her memories and values are molded in that way by her mother from a young age, how is she going to get out of the control? The drama keeps portraying the mother as bad, but mental abuse in real life mixes both good and bad. The angle of presentation of this drama is nothing different from the model opera. The actors didn’t get enough room for expression, and the story is horribly monotonous, which is a far cry from the similarly themed Sharp Objects and American Crime Story Season 2! What a waste.