Were we supposed to feel pity for Francesca?
I have to admit: I didn't "enjoy" this movie; that is, I didn't enjoy it like I enjoyed, say, STAR WARS. That's not to say it's a bad movie; in fact, for a made-for-TV feature it's actually fairly good. The performances were fine: Swanson was superb at playing a black widow and London equally good at playing a coward. But that's precisely the problem, because I wasn't expecting BAD TO THE BONE to be that well done. I didn't think it was going to be "campy" or "funny," per se; I just thought it would be so badly executed that one couldn't take it seriously. But I ended up taking it VERY seriously, and that got me to wondering something.
If "Frankie" was an unrepentant villain and fully deserving of what happened to her at the end, then why were we made to feel sorry for her? Was that intentional? Because if it is, it makes the viewer's reaction to the story awkward at best.
We see her being a victim of child abuse as a little girl. More importantly, the flashback is being imagined by Danny rather than Frankie. So unless Frankie was somehow able to hypnotize her brother into thinking he saw something that never happened - which would be, to say the least, far-fetched - we have to assume that Frankie really was whipped by her father.
But what would be the point? That violence begets violence? That seems almost like a cop-out. Lots of kids have been beaten throughout history, and they don't necessarily grow up to be psychopaths. (I'm certainly not condoning or excusing child abuse, of course; I'm just stating a fact.)
So I'm wondering if there was meant to be some dark subtext here - something that they couldn't have shown on network TV in 1997, and probably not even nowadays. Was Frankie raped by her father, too? Did it happen to her so often that, after a while, she actually started to enjoy it? Did she feel profound shame about this, and finally conclude that her sexuality was the only arena in which she could wield power? Did she come to the point where she believed: "I'm so disgusting and nobody loves me, so it doesn't matter what I do anymore"?
I don't know if I'm reading too much into this, but this probably would have made for a morbidly interesting theatrical film with a main character even more fascinating than she was on TV.