The Boy She Met Online (2010)

Too much of everything

Don't listen to the negative reviews

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This Lifetime movie was unexpectedly well-cast and performed.I found Tracy Spiridakos as an idealistic teenager winsome and convincing in the role, and Jon Cor excelled as an ex-con trying to go straight but thwarted at every turn.The characters were uniformly well-written and conceived. As the mother of a teenage boy, I found Cami's mother and her friend to be realistically conveyed. Teenagers do risky and self-destructive things, creating incredible anxiety in their parents. It's hard for a mom to know how to respond, and this little movie conveys that well. I'll admit the characterization of Jake may have been airbrushed a bit. Would someone who had held up a store and lied to an underage lover really turn out to be as self-sacrificing as this? Maybe I'm gullible, but for me, the fact that Jake puts his life on the line to save Cami and her mom just underscored earlier indications that he wasn't such a bad guy after all. Nicely done.

"Boy She Met Online" is a terrible title for a movie. As for the plot, it is average without many surprises. 17 year old Cami (Tracy Spiridakos) meets cute boy Jake Byers (Jon Cor) online, but the cute boy turns out to be a criminal who is tormented by serious inner demons. Then after she meets Byers, she gets into a lot of trouble with him very quickly. So there is not much special there, aside from the fact that the cute boy is not a fifty year old pedophile hunting down underage girls (which is how I expected this plot to unfold). As for the acting, Tracy Spiridakos' Cami is little more than a one-note performance of a bubbly teenage girl who likes older boys. The best thing in this movie is Jon Cor's performance as Jake Byers. Jon Cor is no where near as good as James Spader in a similar kind of role in "Jack's Back." But Cor is entertaining because his Jack Byers seems real. Essentially Jack Byers wants to be a decent person(as evidenced by his ambition to have a relationship with Cami), but his constant struggles with insecurity, despair and anger and his propensity for violence complicate his efforts to achieve this goal. Yet at the same time, the humanity of Jack Byers' shines through in confused and unexpected ways. The Jack Byers character is much deeper than one would think from a small budget film like this. Unfortunately, Byers' attempt to do something fresh and genuine is not enough for me to recommend the movie.

In this cable-TV friendly "Lifetime" movie, mature-looking "Mount Raven High School" teenager Tracy Spiridakos (as Cami Winters) has met a computer boyfriend. She thinks handsome Jon Cor (as Jake Meyers) is a college athlete, but he's really in prison. When Mr. Cor gets out on probation, he hooks up with his pretty computer date, but doesn't tell her about his arresting past. And, she doesn't tell him she's seventeen. The attractive couple carry on an affair with naughty, knowing secrecy...Meanwhile, Spiridakos has "generation gap" problems with sexy single mother Alexandra Paul (as Tori), who doesn't approve of her daughter dating an ex-convict. Mama Paul and gal-pal Thea Grill (as Kendra Oliver) like to sit on tables and show off their legs. Cor and well-coiffed cell-mate Eddie Guillaume (as Dewayne Jackson) look like they paid frequent visits to the prison hairstylist. As a sleek crook who lures Cor into crime, Tim Finnigan (as Edgar Holly) steals admittedly meager acting honors.**** The Boy She Met Online (7/28/10) Curtis Crawford ~ Tracy Spiridakos, Jon Cor, Alexandra Paul, Tim Finnigan

This Lifetime Channel Movie is a potentially interesting story of a modern variation of a middle-class concern: who is your teenage daughter's boyfriend? In this case, as the title clearly indicates, she met him online. And as it becomes apparent in the first three minutes, he's not just a stranger, he's actually a prison inmate.Unfortunately, while the idea is interesting, this movie is not. The dialogue may be realistic, but it is not interesting to listen to teenagers giggle. The lighting is the same in every scene, lots of side-lighting, but it's just as bright during the day scenes as the night scenes. And the score is intrusive, overwrought and annoying.If there is a real problem with this movie, it's that there is no modulation. Lighting, music, whiny teenage angst, every scene is at the same level. Usually when I watch TV movies, I tend to concentrate on the show and fast-forward through the commercial. Here I was strongly tempted to reverse the sequence.