by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime’s second prime-time (10 p.m. to midnight) movie
last Saturday, May 6, Running Away, had
definite points of similarity to the one they showed just before it, Deadly
Sorority, including the young damsel in
distress and the nerdy young guy with glasses and superior computer hacking
skills who comes along to help save her and ends up romantically paired with
her at the end, but as has often happened with this network when they do the
back-to-back movies on Saturday nights the second film turned out to be
considerably more interesting and richer as a work of art (or artifice) than
the first. Running Away tells the
story of Peg (Paula Trickey) and her two teenage daughters, Maggie (Holly
Deveaux, top-billed) and Lizzie (Madison Lee Brown). Peg lived with the girls’
father but they never formally got married — they talked about doing so but dad
ultimately died before they could — and for the last three years the three
women have lived alone, with Maggie raising her daughters as a single parent
and falling farther behind financially until at the start of this movie she’s frantically
fielding collection calls from her bank (or whatever mortgage servicer owns her
mortgage now — one of the principal causes of the housing crisis that nearly
wrecked the entire U.S. economy in 2008 was the selling and reselling and
re-reselling of home mortgages in ever-larger “packages” to the point where it
often wasn’t clear just who owned
them and who was responsible for seeing that the borrowers paid up). We see her
end of one of these and the treatment she’s getting from the unseen, unheard
caller is so rough that at first I thought she was being blackmailed. Peg is
also dating a well-off pawn-shop owner, Richard Bannister (William McNamara),
who’s depicted as incredibly overbearing and possessive. Richard proposes to
Peg, thereby shocking the hell out of Maggie, who doesn’t like the man and
isn’t looking forward to having him as a stepfather, especially since he
insists that when he and Peg tie the knot they’re going to live in his place (albeit one that’s considerably more elaborate
than the one Peg is about to lose to foreclosure) and she’s going to have to
abide by his rules. She’s also going to have to do her final year of high
school at a new school run by a woman principal whose idea of disciplining the
students might have been regarded by a Marine drill sergeant as excessive.
Maggie gets assigned a student “peer counselor” named Chip (imdb.com lists
Louie Enriquez as the actor playing him but he doesn’t look especially Latino —
just your standard-issue nerdy white kid with Buddy Holly-style glasses) and
then gets suspended from school for three days when she tries to keep him from
being bullied and hits one of the bullies who’s harassing him.
Maggie is also a
pile of work herself: she’s sneaking into her mom’s and stepdad’s supplies of booze
(she mixes beer, wine and Scotch and predictably gets sick from the
combination) and she’s telling her mom she’s going to the community swimming
pool when she’s really going to
the lake where she meets her boyfriend (though she breaks up with him early on
in the action). We also get to see Richard on the end of some phone calls with
unseen callers that drop us a hint that he’s something more than just an
overbearing stepfather who owns a pawn shop — we’re given the idea that he’s
really making his money from some illegal enterprise, and it turns out he’s
using his pawn shop to launder money for a drug cartel. Richard also has been
casting lascivious eyes on Maggie all movie, and when he catches her going
through an entire six-pack in one afternoon he tells her, “I’ll keep your
secrets if you keep mine.” He then offers her a glass of Scotch — we can see he’s drugged it — and the next thing Maggie
knows she’s being raped by her stepfather in one of those stupefied date-rape
states in which she’s aware of what’s going on but too intoxicated to do
anything to stop it. He then repeatedly demands sex from her or else he’ll tell
her mom she’s drinking and cutting up with boys, and her solution at first is
simply to wait it out until she turns 18 in a few months, but later she decides
she can’t take it anymore and will run away. She’s also discovered that Richard
has wired the entire house with surveillance equipment with which he can spy on
everyone in the house and grounds from his home office, and the footage includes
video of Richard raping her — which she downloads courtesy of her friend Chip,
who of course being a nerdy guy with glasses in a Lifetime movie has excellent
hacking skills. She saves it to a flash drive, only Richard realizes his system
has been compromised and in one of the film’s silliest scenes tries to kick his
own computer into oblivion — only Maggie and Chip steal his hard drive and hold
it, eventually turning it over to the local police.
Maggie flees to a nearby
town and keeps her cell phone off so it can’t be used to track her, only when
she’s on her way there she’s accosted on a bus by a young man named Charlie
(Kale Clauson) with dirty-blond hair and the sort of manner that at first led
me to believe he was going to seduce her, then pimp her out and traffic her.
Maggie moves in with Charlie, who isn’t a pimp but is a dealer in drugs and guns who has a live-in
girlfriend who’s also into drugs, and in one chilling scene she goes tearing
out of the house on a drug run and leaves Maggie stuck with the burden of
caring for her son. One of Charlie’s customers is C. J. (Aaron Lee, by far the
hottest guy in this film), who also works at a local tavern and talks the owner
into giving Maggie a waitressing job there even though she has no I.D. To get one,
she asks Charlie to set her up with one of his friends — only just when she’s
about to hand over the money (which she’d stolen from a fund her sister Lizzie
— ya remember her sister Lizzie?
— had been saving up from her income as a baby-sitter for a school field trip
to Mexico), Charlie’s place is raided by two men in ski masks demanding the
guns Charlie was supposed to sell them. It turns out that one of the men is
Maggie’s stepfather, Richard Bannister, and it’s touch-and-go as to whether
Maggie will be able to get away or Richard and his co-conspirator will knock
her off, but eventually she does, she and Chip turn over Richard’s hard drive
to the local police — who at first couldn’t be less interested in it until they
realize that Maggie’s stepfather is also the notorious local crook they’ve been
looking for evidence against for some time now, and the two kids have just
walked the evidence against him into their office waiting for their computer
technicians to recover the data off the damaged but not destroyed hard drive.
It all ends happily, of course, with Bannister arrested, the three women back
together as a family (and inheritors of at least the legitimately earned parts
of Bannister’s fortune), and Maggie presumably sobering up and in the scrawny but
not entirely unappealing arms of her hacker friend Chip.
Running Away is burdened by a script by Sheri McGuinn that has
its lapses into the usual sillinesses, but it also is excellently directed by
Brian Skiba,who has a real flair for making suspense and action scenes exciting
while still keeping them believable. It also helps that casting associate Betsy
Hume has assembled three leading actresses who look enough alike they’re
credible as a mother and her two daughters — one of my common bones to pick about
movies is when their directors and casting people ask us to accept people who
don’t look at all alike as genetic relatives — but what really makes this movie
special and sets it well above the Lifetime norm is McGuinn’s writing of the
character of Maggie and Holly Deveaux’ brilliant portrayal of her. Maggie is
one of the most complex and multidimensional characters I’ve seen in a Lifetime
movie (especially one Christine Conradt didn’t write), dark, brooding, sullen, resigned but also
showing hints of a powerful, potentially strong and independent woman
underneath all that once she starts fighting back against the forces oppressing
her instead of just giving in to them and drinking herself into near-oblivion.
The highlights of her performance are director Skiba’s and cinematographer
Patrice Lucien Cochet’s haunting close-ups of her wearing an odd sort of
lipstick that makes her lips look red on top and almost black beneath — itself
a reflection of the duality of her nature and the extent to which she’s torn
between a sullen acceptance of her fate and an energetic struggle against it.
Though burdened by a few of Lifetime’s typical plot contrivances, Running
Away is a surprisingly impressive piece of
work, and as dumb as parts of McGuinn’s script are she scores with her
intelligent use of telephone conversations to drop us hints about what’s going
on without spelling it out for us or making it too obvious.
