First Daughter

e.tv, Channel 194, Tuesday, 22:05

Blast! I got excited there for a moment. I thought this was the surprisingly good made-for-TV movie of the same name starring Mariel Hemmingway, Doug Savant and Monica Keena, which would have fitted perfectly into my female-driven movie theme for this week.

It was an action drama, with a few good laughs thrown in, about a US secret service agent (Hemmingway) who was demoted for using her brain and ditching the textbook approach to save the life of the president (Savant). Luckily for her, the president is grateful for her help and throws her a bone by assigning her to guard his bratty teenage daughter (Keena) on a camping trip.

It’s no picnic for either of them, but naturally some bad stuff goes down and Hemmingway has a chance to prove that sometimes the by-the-book approach is not the best, and Keena gets to learn some damn manners and appreciation.

But, no. Unfortunately, that’s not the one we get to see. At least, I don’t think so. The data I have lists it as the movie released in 1999, but the director, cast and synopsis match the 2004 movie, starring Katie Holmes, Marc Blucas and Michael Keaton. It’s a by-the-numbers romantic comedy about a US president’s daughter (Holmes) who goes to college abroad and ends up falling in love with the secret service agent (Blucas) who was secretly sent to pose as a college student to keep an eye on her.

It wasn’t all that bad, but the earlier one was far more worthy as a movie. Maybe, if we’re really lucky, e.tv will make a mistake and actually show the 1999 version.