by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched two Lifetime movies, a “premiere” of
something called Deadly Match — though
imdb.com lists it under the working title, College Dating App — and a rerun of something they’d been hyping a lot,
a period piece called Escaping the Madhouse: The Nellie Bly Story starring two actresses who actually have reputations
outside of Lifetime, Christina Ricci and Judith Light. The imdb.com page on Deadly
Match contained a “trivia” item embargoed
by a “spoiler” tag — with the demise of the imdb.com message boards people are
sneaking the snarky message-board content onto the trivia page or into
“reviews” — saying, “This is the worst movie ever made.” Actually Deadly
Match struck me as a bit above the usual
Lifetime fare, even though its central premise — nubile young girls meeting the
increasingly high cost of college tuition by prostituting themselves to rich
men — is one Lifetime has done quite a lot before. Deadly Match starts in a parking garage with the heroine, Trina
(Alyssa Lynch), talking in a parking garage with her best friend Jade (Alyson
Bath) when suddenly a black SUV parked in the garage starts up. The driver guns
the motor and runs Jade down, killing her. In a normal Lifetime movie we’d then
get a chyron title flashing us back days, weeks or even months earlier and we’d
find out who Jade was and why the mystery driver would want to kill her.
Instead writer Samuel Hayes (adapting an “original” — quotes definitely merited
— story by Nicole Reid and Kelly Goodner) and director David Langlois have
other directions in mind.
Trina, who’s balancing a scholarship, a work-study
job in the student center and a ferocious class schedule that leaves her no
time for dating or anything fun, deals with the tough business professor Savoy
(Tatyana Ali in one of her usual African-American authority figure roles,
though we’re not sure at first whether she’ll be the Black woman who talks
sense into the stupid white characters or the Black best friend who discovers
the villain’s plot and gets killed for her pains) by starting a dating app
whose name seems to have morphed through various combinations before Hayes
settled on “Make a Date” (the name is “Upfront” on the imdb.com synopsis and
“Let’s Date” on Lifetime’s own page). Trina enlists the aid of her friend Zach
(Mitch Ainley, who’s handsome and fun to look at even though he’s not exactly a
sex god) to help her with the coding for the site, and it takes off and is an
immediate success even though Trina is too busy to use it herself. When her
friends Raquelle (blonde, white Debs Howard) and Lacey (African-American
Bethany Brown) urge her to take the plunge — and Raquelle supplies her a red
gown in which Alyssa Lynch looks totally ridiculous, though it’s supposed to
make her sexy — Trina ends up on a date with a creepy 28-year-old attorney who
takes her to a fancy restaurant, orders appetizers and a bottle of very
expensive wine, then says they should ditch the place before dinner and go back
to his condo, where he wants “a girl who will follow orders.” Trina realizes not
only that she’s been mistaken for a prostitute but her friends have hijacked
her dating app to make sex-for-money dates with their johns. She also learns
that her friend Jade was also hooking her way through college, though without
Trina’s site to help her she must have run afoul of the “wrong people” and got
herself killed. Meanwhile, both the local police (whom we never see) and the
college security people (whom we do) are doing their level best to cover up the
crimes, officially ruling Jade’s death an accident and Lacey’s — who’s found
dead in her dorm room with a bottle of pills at her side and a supposed suicide
note scrawled in lipstick on her mirror — a suicide. While all this is
happening the school’s dean, Brackett (Ben Wilkinson), tells Trina that she’s
lost her full-ride scholarship to state budget cuts (if she had a full ride,
why was she also doing a work-study job?) but she can reinstate it under a
different program if she transfers to the university’s other campus 200 miles
away.
Spoiler Alert: Judging from the snarky closeup Langlois gives Wilkinson as he tells
Trina all this, we know instantly that he’s the bad guy behind all the murders,
and he gets to off Professor Savoy (so Tatyana Ali plays both the African-American authority figure and the best friend who discovers the villain’s plot and
gets killed for her pains!) before the police, called by Zach after Trina
stupidly went to confront the killer alone, come on the scene, save Trina’s
life and arrest Dean Brackett — whose motive was that he started buying tricks
from Jade, fell madly in love with her, killed her when she wouldn’t be with
him permanently, then started knocking off anyone who could link them and
expose his secret. The final shot is of Trina and Zach embracing and kissing —
their shared ordeal has turned them from friends into lovers. Deadly
Match (a title which suggests a story about
a heroine being stalked by someone she met online and who became obsessed with
her) is the stuff of a pretty ordinary Lifetime movie, but this is actually better
than average, thanks partly to Langlois’ mastery of atmosphere (there are a lot
of half-lit neo-noir shots and
he’s able to find a lot of sinister-looking locations even though virtually the
whole movie takes place in the college) but mainly to Alyssa Lynch’s tough,
understated performance as Trina. Playing a woman who, unusually for a Lifetime
heroine, knows exactly who she is and what she wants, she tosses off the role
with a calm self-assurance that would make her a “natural” the next time someone
wants to do a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit-style series about a female cop.
