by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Often on Saturday nights Lifetime shows movies back-to-back
with similar themes and plot premises — and often that’s a mistake because the
similarities take some of the edge away from both films. That happened last night
when they followed up Newlywed and Dead
with The Wrong Child, which
judging from the original air date of June 26, 2016 given on the imdb.com page
for it would appear to have been last week’s “Lifetime world premiere.” The Wrong Child is yet another Lifetime drama about a couple who suddenly find themselves confronted
by a person who claims to be their long-lost kid, and while this one isn’t a
patch on the genuinely moving and beautiful Lost Boy (in which we definitely learned the “long-lost son”
was an impostor but his motives were kept powerfully ambiguous throughout), at
least the first two-thirds of it were quite good, maintaining the suspense and
powered by a gnomic performance by Robbie Davidson as Andrew Haight. (So far
all this fascinating actor has done is this, a short and a single episode of
the TV series Jane the Virgin. He
deserves more; indeed, he deserves a real chance at stardom!) The couple who
suddenly find their lives upended by this young man are Charles Callahan (Gary
Daniels), a white guy with a British accent who’s supposedly a sensationally
successful architect working on a $6 million project to redevelop the city
(this is taking place in Malibu, and at least in some establishing second-unit
shots Malibu is “playing” itself), and his wife Renée (Vivica A. Fox,
top-billed), a voluptuous Rubens-esque Black woman who, in a neat switcheroo on
what we expect from the stereotypes, is the member of the couple who comes from
a family with money.
They have a daughter, Amy (played by someone billed simply
as “Stevena” but listed on imdb.com as Stevanna Jackson (I presume from the
one-word name that she’s a singer — I still remember the time years ago TV
Guide ran an article on the then-popular
singer Brandy, which said that she had just recorded a duet with Monica, broken
up with Maxwell and was now dating Mase and Usher, and I wondered, “Isn’t this
woman allowed to know anybody
with more than one name?”), though it’s clearly established that Amy is Renée’s
daughter by a previous husband who died. (This seems odd since Stevena is
light-skinned enough we could readily believe her as the Obama-esque offspring
of a racially mixed couple.) Renée runs a bookstore (though it also sells CD’s
— mislabeled DVD’s on the set — and clothes) with a white partner named Joyce
(Tracy Nelson), and it functions both for her and for us as a place of refuge
from the melodramatics that ensue when Andrew shows up and announces that he’s
Charles’ long-lost son from a casual sexual encounter that took place 20 years ago
in Florida before Charles and Renée met. (One thing that was nice about this
movie was the actors playing Charles and Renée both pronounced the “t” in
“often.”) Things start going awry almost immediately and reach a head when,
just before he’s about to make the big presentation to the city officials who
are is clients, Charles’ office is vandalized and spray-painted in blue paint
with the graffito, “Time to Play.” Renée’s daughter Amy covers for Andrew,
saying that they were just playing paintball and that’s why he has traces of
blue paint on him, but we’re going, “Yeah, right.” About two-thirds of the way through the movie,
though, what has previously been a subtle, suspenseful thriller, deliberately
kept powerfully ambiguous by director David DeCoteau and writer Matthew Jason
Walsh, takes a hard right turn into the usual Lifetime absurdity and
melodramatic excess. We’ve already been suspicious of Andrew because he was
shown much younger in a prologue in which he witnessed his mom stab his abusive
father to death, and we first were introduced to him from an apartment across
the street from the Callahan home spying on them and photographing them with a
long-lensed camera. Later we saw him putting bugs all over their house —
singularly obvious ones one would think the Callahans would notice — so we’ve already been conditioned to think he’s up
to no good but precisely what
no-good he’s up to remains a mystery.
The turning point at which this movie
goes from effective suspense drama to typical Lifetime sleaze is when Andrew —
whose real name, we later learn, is Owen, though “Haight” does appear to be his
legal last name — goes to Renée’s bookstore and badgers Joyce over her
insistence on researching his background on the Internet, then kills her and
for good measure torches the store so her body will be consumed and it’ll look
like she was killed in an accidental fire. Then we get a tense scene between
Owen and Charles Callahan in which writer Walsh throws us the typical Lifetime
surprise-twist curveball: Charles hired Owen in the first place as part of a
plot for him to impersonate an
alleged long-lost son. The idea was to get Renée’s family to give Owen $500,000
to study medicine at UC Berkeley, only instead of going to school Owen would
simply disappear; he’d get $50,000 as a cut and the rest would go to Charles,
who it turns out isn’t a successful architect at all but a lousy investor who
has already lost all his wife’s own money and fallen so far behind on the
mortgage they’re about to lose that spectacular Malibu home. Only Owen has
other ideas; we’re not all that sure what they are and we get the impression he isn’t all that clear either, but they seem to
involve taking over the Callahan family, killing Charles and Renée and ending
up with Amy, who he has the hots for (what a surprise!). Robbie Davidson’s
performance is incredible, bringing more to Walsh’s silly script than it
deserves and making us believe in the character even though when we think about
it later, we’re wondering, “Why the hell was he doing that?” Vivica Fox and Stevena are also quite good, but
Gary Daniels is at sea in a role several sizes too big for him; unlike
Davidson, he can’t make his good-guy-to-bad-guy transition even remotely convincing, though in one way he’s right for the
part: he’s so good at conveying ineptitude we can readily believe he’ll do no
better as a crook than he did as an architect. Still, The Wrong Child — the first two-thirds of it, anyway — is chillingly
effective suspense melodrama and well worth seeing even after it takes that
hard right turn into typical Lifetime unbelievability!
