by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened a movie Lifetime
had on last Saturday, Unstable (not to be confused with another TV-movie called Unstable that Lifetime aired just three years ago), which though it was
apparently prepared for a theatrical release by the Starz company (at least it
has an MPAA rating on its otherwise woefully complete imdb.com site — the
attributions of the actors to their characters are my own and they could be
wrong, but most of the actors’ names were not identified with their characters on imdb.com, nor
does the Starz Web site have a listing of the cast with both actor and
character names) last March ended up on Lifetime in July. Though it’s not a Christine Conradt script it’s clearly the work
of others who have internalized her formulae, writer Michael De La Torre and
director Michael Feifer. It’s the story of Kristen (Ashley Scott), a former
realtor (or should I write that “Realtor”? There’s an association of
real-estate professionals which makes a big deal of that and even attempted to
trademark the word “Realtor,” with the capitalization, so they could reserve
the word for their members, though both Realtors and realtors sell people’s
houses to other people) who gave up her job when she married successful defense
attorney Jason (Jay Pickett). Now the marriage of Jason and Kristen is on the
rocks; Kristen has already filed for divorce, she expects the filing to be
complete in one month, and her main concern is keeping both the house (a
marvelous estate in Beverly Hills — don’t you just hate movies in which the characters never have to worry
about money?) and, more importantly, her son Oliver (Max Charles). The only
problem is that Jason keeps coming over unexpectedly and bribing Oliver with
expensive presents, including a remote-controlled helicopter toy and,
ultimately, a horse (a present they promised the boy pre-breakup and naturally
the kid, who practically defines the word “spoiled,” doesn’t see why he can’t
have his own horse just because his parents are breaking up). Kristen goes back
to work as a realtor and the branch manager of her office, Ed (George Newbern),
has an unrequited crush on her.
Part of her plan for keeping her house is
renting out the guest house, and Nick Rees (Ivan Sergei) shows up and takes the
place, claiming to be a garage mechanic and indeed staging a meet-cute with
Kristen when he comes along while she’s having car trouble and he fixes her car
on the spot. Nick is described in the script as the hunk no woman can resist —
Ivan Sergei is an attractive actor but he’s not that attractive, having an unpleasantly craggy face and
not much in the way of a basket — and when he’s around strange things start
happening to Kristen, like someone tries to break into her house and she’s
being spied on by miniature cameras in her bedroom and other ordinarily private
areas of the house. For about the first half of the movie we’re kept wondering
whether the mystery man terrorizing and spying on Kristen is her ex-husband
Jason or the too-good-to-be-true guy in the guest house, Nick — and then in a
neatly done but not all that surprising reversal, it turns out they both are: Nick is really Brandon, a con man and money
launderer who’s a former client of Jason’s. Jason wasn’t a good enough attorney
to spare Brandon a prison sentence altogether but he did get the money laundering charge thrown out on a
technicality, and as part of his reward Jason hired Brandon to pose as the
mysterious “Nick,” seduce Kristen and video-record himself having sex with her
so Jason could introduce the video in court and thereby prove that Kristen is
an unfit mother and he should
get custody of Oliver. Only Nick decides he not only likes his new role in
society, he likes Kristen as well, so he kills Jason, stuffs the body in the
back of Jason’s own car and later drives the car off a cliff and fakes a note
so Jason’s death will look like a suicide. He also tries to run Kristen’s boss
and friend Ed down with Jason’s car — he thought Ed was getting too close to
the truth about him — only Ed survives and tells Kristen and Megan (Natalie
Baron), her friend from the office, that it was Nick, not Jason, behind the
wheel of the fatal car.
Nick/Brandon also kills Carl (Scott Anthony Leet), the
garage owner who gave him a cover job and whom he’d met in prison, to steal
Carl’s identity, and in the climax he lures Oliver out of the house and drives
him to the desert, then demands all of Kristen’s money as a ransom and leads
her out to a desert location, warning her not to call the cops or Oliver will
die — only Kristen and Megan are able to overpower him and hold him until the
police duly arrive and take Nick/Brandon into custody. Unstable is decently done and free from some of the defects
of Lifetime movies — the one big reversal makes sense, the plot as a whole is
far-fetched but at least coherent (though once again a Lifetime writer ignores
the general rule that a con artist is a nonviolent sort of criminal who
generally doesn’t kill anybody, and
certainly doesn’t rack up the extensive body count Nick does in this film), the
acting is quite good (Ashley Scott blessedly doesn’t overplay the victim card;
she’s shown as tough and resourceful even under the most extreme circumstances)
and the only real “cheat” is an opening “teaser” version of the final desert
sequence whose action doesn’t match the actual ending. But there’s nothing
really special about it, either, nothing to mark it apart from the Lifetime
norm, and when Kristen and Ed come together at the end it’s what we’ve been expecting because he’s the one man in her life who doesn’t
have any wretchedly bad qualities: he’s neither an overbearing, domineering
husband nor a psycho crook.
