THE ODDS

Four abandoned kids outwit life’s travails, and not just their own.

With their dad long dead and their stepmother debunking for new sex, Meg, Joel, Laurie and Susannah, desperate not to be separated by children’s services, decide to fend for themselves. They’re smart enough to pull it off until Joel finds Nick from the local pizzeria, his leg wrecked by a bullet, lying next to a corpse in an abandoned building. With Meg’s help, Joel carts Nick back to their place to set his leg and protect him from the bad guys he says are after him. They’re not the only ones looking for him either. Pittsburgh Homicide’s Colleen Greer and John Potocki, now commandeered by a Narcotics squad trying for a major drug bust, are also on his trail, led to him by the boy who scampered off when Nick dispatched the enforcer. With pilfered pain pills and medical treatment gleaned from internet sources, the four siblings toil to insure Nick’s recovery but jeopardize their own future, with dealers, cops and even their stepmom looming on their doorstep.

The kids are self-sufficient, supersmart and, alas, mostly unbelievable, and there’s little more than a cameo role for Colleen (Afterimage, 2007) and a glum outlook for her boss, who’s undergoing chemo. Would make a B movie on the Lifetime channel though.