Another Duff Husband for Haylie
Sarah (Haylie Duff - Sweet Surrender) is happily married to Jason (David O'Donnell - Merry Kissmas), they have a son Brandon (Judah Nelson) and they live in a stunning lakeside home. There are though two negatives in Sarah's life; one is that Brandon has a rare illness which might require him to have transplant surgery and secondly, Jason's work as a salesman sees him leaving home for long periods of time. But with bills mounting on their stunning home Jason goes missing and when Sarah gets in touch with a friend of the family, Detective Sharpson (Parker Stevenson), he begins to suspect that she may actually have been involved in Jason's disappearance. Now Sarah is going to have to try and find Jason on her own and what she discovers is going rock her world.
How do I approach this review of "His Secret Family", which is also known as "A Secret Life", because either title really explains it doesn't it? So we have the usual set up of the lovely wife with the perfect family and frankly the most beautiful home suddenly having her world torn apart when her husband disappears one day. And of course what she discovers after some time is that her life is all a lie and he has, as the title says, a secret family. Oh there is the complication of a son who has a rare illness but everything in "His Secret Family" seems to be standard.
Now I had better say spoiler alert because I can't sell "His Secret Family" to you without giving something, although not everything, away. Normally in this type of movie the wife discovers that some time after they got married the husband met someone else and married them, keeping the two a secret from each other. But in this case Sarah discovers that their marriage came second and so she is the one who unknowingly started an affair with and then married an already married man who still lives with his family. So that is the twist, the attempt to make "His Secret Family" stand out from all those other secret family movies and sadly this revelation is not enough to make it stand out.
Now what is kind of interesting about "His Secret Family", and I am kind of clutching at straws here to find something interesting, is the casting as Haylie Duff is in a typical role of the wife married to the wrong guy. But then you have Parker Stevenson in the role of the family friend and detective and that is what is a bit unusual. Usually you would have the nice guy detective fall for the cheated wife but there is none of that here and you wonder why they didn't go down that route with a younger actor in the usual detective role.
What this all boils down to is that "His Secret Family" is a play on the usual theme of a man with two wives and two families but the play on it isn't spectacular enough to make this stand out from the crowd. In truth the only thing spectacular in this movie is the stunning lakeside house.
