The Forgettable Virginia Madsen 2003 Television Movie Tempted Is Notable Mainly for the Laughable Casting of a Then-23 Year Old Jason Momoa as the Father of a 15 Year Old

Virginia Madsen is a very beautiful woman. Don’t know what’s going on in this image, however.

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the site and career-sustaining column where I give YOU, the ferociously sexy, intimidatingly brilliant Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for each additional selection.

I recently watched Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw for my project over at Substack where I’m writing about all eleven films in the Fast and the Furious franchise. 

I was amused and not at all convinced by the spin-off’s hilariously unsuccessful attempts to make it seem like siblings played by Jason Statham and Vanessa Kirby are roughly the same age and grew up together and engaged in larcenous shenanigans when Statham is a full two decades older than Kirby and looks it. 

In a similar vein, the 2003 television movie Tempted casts Fast X star Jason Momoa as the hunky father of a fifteen year old boy when the water-loving was a mere twenty-three years old. 

Twenty-three years old! That means that the Aquaman star would have had to have knocked up his son’s mother when he was seven or eight years old. I’m not sure that’s even medically possible and this bizarre choice never stops being a huge distraction.

The people who made Tempted must have thought that Momoa, who at that point was barely able to drink legally, looked much older than he actually was and consequently would be convincing as the father of a teenager. He doesn’t! Momoa looks exactly like what he was: an obscenely handsome man in his early twenties. 

It’s also possible that Tempted gives a veritable child a teenaged son because it would be harder to forgive wife and mother Emma Burke (Virginia Madsen) for cheating on her husband with a father in his thirties rather than a man-child only a few years removed from his teenage years. 

The pairing of a sexy older woman and a super-sexy young stud in paradise made me think that Tempted was going to be a caucasian variation on How Stella Got Her Groove Back. 

But Tempted isn’t really about the fling between Madsen and Momoa’s characters. That’s only one element of the film. Tempted seems much more interested in unpacking all sorts of family drama involving secret mothers and shocking revelations. 

I was hoping that one of those shocking revelations would explain how Momoa managed to successfully impregnate someone while only a child himself but Tempted doesn’t go into any of that. 

Very suggestive placement of that Lifetime logo!

Tempted opens by establishing that its paralegal protagonist leads a life filled with responsibilities and obligations. She’s more convincingly the mother of a rebellious teenage daughter and the wife of one of those tedious businessman types that are always talking and thinking about a big deal. 

Then Emma learns that the soulful Hawaiian woman who raised her has died and that her final wish was for Emma to return to Hawaii to spread her ashes. 

Emma hadn’t seen her surrogate mother much in her final years. She didn’t even know that she was sick. But she’s not about to deny a beloved figure from her past a final desire so she flies down to Hawaii to do the deed. 

In Hawaii Emma falls into a flirtatious relationship with local Kala (Momoa) that soon leads to smooching, making out AND canoodling. 

A change in latitude leads to a change in attitude for the uptight family woman and legal professional. Emma is shocked to learn that the woman she thought was her biological mother was not her mother at all and that her real mother is Julia (Lainie Kazan), who was only nineteen when she got knocked up by Emma’s cad of a dad. 

Kazan, incidentally, was the model for Jack Kirby’s legendary New Gods icon Big Barda. Jack Kirby was apparently admiring the veteran character actor’s naked breasts in an issue of Playboy and decided to base the character’s physical appearance on Kazan and her personality on his wife. 

The Lust in the Dust star is Jewish but at this point has played pretty much every ethnicity at this point. In Tempted Kazan is Hawaiian and also does not look anything like her long lost daughter. 

Learning that much of what she was told as a child was a goddamn lie has a profound effect on Emma. It makes her reexamine her life, her family and her priorities. 

She understandably does not know what to make of a stranger she just learned is her mother. Can she forgive her biological mother for abandoning her? 

I thought that the May-December romance between Momoa, who at that point was known primarily for his role in Baywatch: Hawaii, and Madsen would be the film’s focus. Instead it feels more like an afterthought. 

Emma is attracted to the relatively slight Momoa, who was not yet the muscle-bound man-God he would become, but that attraction has concrete limits and learning the truth of her own conception makes her reluctant to break up her family for the sake of a man presumably in his mid-thirties. 

Tempted was written and directed by women, aired on Lifetime and is concerned with the inner life of a very attractive middle aged woman that inexplicably devotes a big chunk of its running time to a subplot involving greedy outside developers wanting to build on the island, much to Kala’s chagrin. 

Madsen does a fine job as always playing a woman at a crossroads in her life and career but Tempted doesn’t give her much to work with. Tempted will be of interest primarily to people who want to ogle Momoa in an early role but he similarly doesn’t make much of an impression beyond being way too young to be playing the father of a teenager. 

Tempted is typical Lifetime original movie fare. It’s aggressively unambitious, a breezy time-waster that unites an Academy Award-winning actress and an international super-hunk yet manages to be eminently forgettable all the same. 

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