- An orphaned teenager is taken in by a Malibu couple but discovers they aren't the caring friends they seemed to be.
- When Ruby Baker's parents are killed in a car accident, she and her brother, Rhett, must travel to Malibu, to live with Terrence and Erin Glass, their former neighbors. At first, all seems well. Ruby is making new friends at school and Rhett is getting more video games and flashy toys than he's ever had in his life. When Ruby speaks to her family's estate lawyer, he tells her that her parents have left her and Rhett $4 million. Suddenly, Ruby begins to notice odd behavior from Terry and Erin.—Robert Rosado <valentine@love-hurts.org>
- Rhett and Ruby Baker are orphaned by their rich parents' fatal car accident, and by testament foster guardianship falls to their former neighbors Terrence 'Terry' and Ruby Glass, so they move into their Malibu modernistic beach house, while family estate lawyer Begleiter manages their $4 million trust account. Rhett appreciates the toys to sweeten the deal, but Ruby, who initially adored Terry for his funeral speech and haughtily ignored concerned uncle Jack, soon grows suspicious of everyone and the accident, while Terry almost seems flirtatious with her. It gradually becomes clear that Terry's shiny firm is in dire financial straits, with loan sharks threatening him, while Erin is drug-addicted, drawing in drug dealing scum. After confiding in attorney Begleiter she mistrusts him and feels tricked when the social services inspector he sent finds her claims disproved conspicuously last-minute, like separate rooms, like separate rooms for the siblings, but there's no proof to impress the police.—KGF Vissers
- After the sudden death of their parents in a car accident, 16-year-old Ruby Baker and her 11-year-old brother Rhett are sent to live in the posh Malibu house of Terry and Erin Glass, old friends of their parents. But Ruby soon learns that her new foster parents are not all they seem to be. Terry and Erin draw Ruby and an unsuspecting Rhett into deadly mind games and deceptions, and it becomes clear that Terry has set his sights on Ruby and Rhett's $4 million trust fund.—Matthew Patay
- When Ruby and Rhett Baker's parents are killed in a car accident, their carefree lives are suddenly shattered. Moving into an incredible house in Malibu with the Glasses - old friends of the family - seems to be the beginning of a new life for them. But Ruby soon stumbles upon information that leads her to suspect that her new guardians might somehow be responsible for her parents' deaths. Now she finds herself all alone in a duel of wits with the ruthless couple - and she's the only thing standing between them and her $4 million inheritance.—Anonymous
- 16-year-old Ruby Baker (Leelee Sobieski), who lives in California, is out partying late with her friends. When Ruby arrives home, there is a patrol car waiting for her.
Ruby assumes that her parents, David Anthony Baker (Michael O'Keefe) and Grace Heather Avery Baker (Rita Wilson) reported her missing, since she was out so late.
Instead, the police inform her that David and Grace have been killed in a car accident on Mulholland Drive, and a devastated Ruby faints. Drunk driving is blamed for the accident. David was 45-years-old, and Grace was 42-years-old.
At the funeral, Ruby's 11-year-old brother Rhett Clark Baker (Trevor Morgan) breaks down in tears as he's about to talk about their parents, and he's comforted by David and Grace's good friends Terrence "Terry" Glass (Stellan Skarsgard) and Dr. Erin Madre Glass (Diane Lane).
Terry gives a very eloquent tribute to David and Grace. After the funeral, Ruby and Rhett's uncle Jack Avery (Chris Noth), Grace's brother who lives in Chicago, talks to Ruby, who hadn't seen Jack in 10 years. Ruby was 6-years-old back then. Rhett was only a year old back then, so he doesn't really know Jack at all.
After the funeral, Ruby is told by Grace and David's estate lawyer, Alvin Begleiter (Bruce Dern), that Grace and David were very well off, and she and Rhett have enough money to be well off for the rest of their lives.
Alvin also tells Ruby that in their will, Grace and David asked that Terry and Erin be Ruby and Rhett's guardians in case anything happened to Grace and David. Alvin then tells Ruby that if she ever needs him for anything, to please call him.
Ruby and Rhett move into Terry and Erin's house, which is a very expensive house overlooking Malibu, California. The house is furnished with the finest items money can buy.
Rhett finally has the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 that he always wanted, the fridge is well-stocked, and there is a nice swimming pool outside.
The strange thing is, even in such a large house, Ruby has to share a bedroom with Rhett, but Terry says that Ruby and Rhett sharing a bedroom is a temporary arrangement. Ruby and Rhett no longer go to their exclusive private schools, but rather to the Malibu public schools.
Ruby is horrified by her first day of driver's ed, because they show a film about drunk driving, and it reminds Ruby that David and Grace's deaths were blamed on drunk driving.
Things are going great for Rhett, but then Ruby sees an argument between Terry and Erin. Terry takes Ruby out for dinner, and assures her that everything is fine.
On the way home, Terry is driving alarmingly fast. Terry stops the car, and it looks like he's reaching over to kiss Ruby. She pulls back, and is very scared.
Terry says, "You're not wearing your shoulder belt," then he puts her seatbelt on her. When they get home, Ruby goes inside and finds Erin passed out on the couch, with a needle in her arm. Ruby is more than a bit alarmed.
The next day, Ruby talks Vicki (Julia Vera), the housekeeper, into driving her halfway to town, then she hitchhikes the rest of the way to Alvin's office. Ruby tells Alvin that she doesn't think David and Grace wanted Terry and Erin to be their guardians.
Ruby also tells Alvin about the arrangement of sharing a bedroom with Rhett, and about when Terry stopped the car last night and acted like he was going to kiss her. Ruby also tells Alvin about Erin shooting herself up with the syringe.
Alvin tells Ruby that she and Rhett would become wards of the state if things don't work out with Terry and Erin, but Alvin says he'll look into it.
Ruby remembers that Alvin told her that she and Rhett have enough money to be well off for the rest of their lives, and Ruby asks Alvin how much money that is...and Alvin says that it's $4,000,000. Grace and David were better off than Ruby and Rhett thought they were.
That night, Terry and Erin tell Ruby that Erin was injecting herself because Erin is diabetic. On the next day, Vicki doesn't pick Ruby up from school, so Ruby goes to the building of Glass Transit Incorporated (GTI), Terry's company.
A secretary directs Ruby to a lounge, and Ruby sees Terry getting roughed up by a pair of men, and she doesn't know that the two men work for a loan shark.
The lounge overlooks GTI's work garage, where the company's cars are worked on. Ruby goes down into the work garage, and sees the Saab that belonged to David and Grace.
On the way home, Terry, knowing that Ruby saw him getting roughed up, tells Ruby that sometimes businessmen get carried away. Also, Terry has fired Vicky because she drove Ruby halfway to town yesterday without asking him.
That night, Ruby writes down the code number to Terry and Erin's security system as Terry types it. That way, Ruby can get in and out whenever she has to.
Ruby checks the newspaper online, and discovers that instead of driving the Saab, Grace and David were driving a BMW sedan when they crashed. Ruby e-mails that information to Alvin.
Ruby falls asleep working on a Hamlet paper, and when she wakes up, she discovers that Terry has finished it for her. She thanks him, and he just smiles and winks.
Ruby is visited at school by Nancy Ryan (Kathy Baker), a social worker who is quite disturbed by what Ruby told Alvin. Nancy goes to Terry and Erin's house, and Terry acts agitated that Nancy is doing this in the middle of a business day.
Nancy checks out the house, but conveniently, Ruby and Rhett now have separate bedrooms, and the drugs in Erin's medicine cabinet are now drugs for diabetics.
After Nancy leaves, Ruby notices something in the garbage...a postcard that Jack sent to Ruby and Rhett from Chicago. Ruby tears off the section that has Jack's phone number on it, then puts the rest of the card back in the garbage.
That night, as a thunderstorm soaks the area, Ruby tries to login to her AOL account, and gets a message that says "This account has been closed."
The loan shark's men call Terry, and Ruby overhears Terry telling the men that six months ago, Terry took in a silent partner who skimmed money from him, causing Terry to need a loan, and Terry's next payment is due tomorrow, but they decide to give Terry two days.
On the next day, Ruby uses the school's pay phone to call Alvin. Alvin tells Ruby that he sent her an e-mail, and Ruby tells Alvin that she didn't get the message, because Terry ended her account. Alvin tells Ruby that the BMW sedan was registered to GTI.
Ruby is called to see Vice Principal Bassett (Rutanya Alda). Ruby's teacher, Mr. Kim (Michael Paul Chan), has accused her of plagiarizing the Hamlet paper from a book called "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human."
Ruby didn't know that Terry copied from this book. Ruby now realizes that Terry set her up by copying from the book, and then letting the school think Ruby did it.
That night, during a thunderstorm, Ruby finds a card for The Challenge School for Teenage Girls, which is located in Cedar Falls, Washington. Terry wants Ruby out of his way, because she's been so nosy.
Ruby tries to call Jack, but Jack is not home. Ruby takes the car keys out of Terry and Erin's bedroom, then Ruby wakes Rhett up, and they take Terry's car, and get out of there.
Ruby knows that Terry and Erin had Rhett lie to Nancy, and Rhett didn't know Nancy was a social worker. Ruby helps Rhett realize that Terry and Erin bought him off by giving him the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64.
While Ruby and Rhett are still out on the road, it turns out that the road is blocked by a mudslide, and Terry and Erin are right behind them. Terry and Erin take them back home. On the way home, Ruby tells Terry that she knows that Terry killed David and Grace.
Terry had borrowed $1,000,000 from the loan sharks. Terry, fearing for his life, knew that if David and Grace got killed, he and Erin would become Ruby and Rhett's new guardians, putting the $4,000,000 within Terry's grasp so he can have a chance to pay off the two loan sharks, and keep them from killing him.
When they pull up to the house, Ruby runs, and Terry chases her inside the house as Erin puts Rhett to bed. Terry holds Ruby down while Erin injects Ruby with fentanyl, a drug that knocks Ruby out.
A month goes by, and Terry and Erin are pretty much keeping Ruby in the drug-induced coma. Then they run out of fentanyl. Erin, who is actually a drug addict, is found stealing drugs at work, and she is told that her medical license will be revoked, so now they can't get any more fentanyl.
That angers Terry, who decides to go out and find something that will keep Ruby in the drug-induced coma. On the next day, Ruby wakes up, and Erin is laying beside of her -- dead of an overdose from injecting herself.
Ruby wakes Rhett up, and when Ruby and Rhett try to leave, Terry grabs them, and locks them in the basement. Terry goes into the garage and cuts the brake line on his car, in hopes that Ruby and Rhett will escape in that car, and be killed in a wreck when the brakes fail, so Terry can have the $4,000,000.
When Terry finishes, he pulls the car out of the garage and goes back inside the house, grabs a bottle of an alcoholic beverage, and pretends to pass out, leaving the keys to the car right next to him. Rhett breaks out of the basement, takes Terry's keys, and unlocks the basement for Ruby.
Just before Ruby and Rhett go outside, Alvin shows up, and Ruby and Rhett hide so they can hear what Alvin has to say. It turns out that Alvin warned Terry about everything Ruby told Alvin, because Alvin trusted Terry, and David and Grace trusted Terry.
Alvin believed that if Terry was lying and the courts stepped in and took Ruby and Rhett away from Terry and Erin, then Ruby and Rhett would have no place to go, so Alvin thought he was helping Ruby and Rhett.
The two loan sharks pull up in one of Terry's company Lamborghinis. The loan shark's enforcers are lead to believe that Alvin was the silent partner who skimmed from Terry, so the enforcers fatally stab Alvin.
Next, they grab Terry and lead him outside to his car, the one he cut the brake line on. Since they both have 2-seaters, they take 2 cars.
Terry pleads with them to take the other car in the garage, because Terry knows that the car in the garage doesn't have a leaking brake line like the car outside the garage does.
When they get inside the garage, they find the tires flat and have to take his sports car. What they don't know is that Ruby used a knife to flatten the tires.
Terry is pleading with the enforcers, but they put duct tape over his mouth to shut him up, and they tie his hands with duct tape. The two cars take off down the winding Malibu roads.
The brakes fail in Terry's car because of the leaking brake line. That causes the car to bump into the Lamborghini, which is hit by a large truck, killing one of the enforcers. And then the car carrying Terry and the other enforcer crashes through a guardrail, and over a small cliff.
Ruby and Rhett are walking alone down the road, and they're picked up by a cop who asks them if they need any help. Down the road, the cop notices that the guardrail is missing a section. He tells Ruby and Rhett to wait in his car while he checks it out.
The cop walks down the hill, sees the car and a body, and calls in one fatality -- the other enforcer. He also calls in the location. Then the cop is knocked out by a bloodied and bruised Terry.
Ruby and Rhett look on in horror as Terry staggers onto the road. Ruby jumps to the front seat of the cop's car, grabs the keys, and starts the car. The look on Ruby's face shows that she hates Terry for killing David and Grace. Ruby backs the car up a few feet, and then switches gears.
As Ruby floors the car forward, Terry pulls out a gun, and fires a shot as Ruby slams the car into Terry, killing Terry and causing his body to roll onto the hood, and then quickly off of the hood. A couple more cops show up, having received the first cop's call.
Later, as Jack looks on, Ruby and Rhett put flowers on the double grave where David and Grace were buried. Ruby and Rhett will be living with Jack in Chicago.
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