by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
So is The Wrong Friend
— another in a Lifetime series of movies with the title “The Wrong _____” (my
favorite so far is The Wrong Car,
about a rapist and killer who meets his victims by picking them up as an Uber
driver … though of course they called it something else!) and a pretty typical
Lifetime tale about the new student in a prestigious but still public high
school, Chris Andrews (the strikingly handsome Jared Scott), whose well-heeled
family (at first we think his dad is a computer tycoon but later it’s revealed
he’s a high-powered super-attorney) has been buying him out of one scrape after
another. They’ve just had to pull him out of the ultra-exclusive St. Joseph’s
private school — one of those places where the children of the 1 percent are
trained to assume their hereditary mantle of getting to run the country and
everyone and everything in it (The Wrong Friend is surprisingly class-conscious for a Lifetime
movies, though others, including the marvelous Restless Virgins, have done this even better!) — and they get him
into Kennedy, a better-than-average but still public school (one wonders
whether writer Adam Rockoff thought of it as a charter school) whose principal,
Atkins (Vivica A. Fox, a Black woman similar in appearance and “type” to S.
Epatha Merkerson on the original Law and Order, and one with enough of a following some of the
imdb.com reviewers complained about the brevity of her part), agrees to admit
Chris Andrews as a student in exchange for the Andrews parents making a major
donation to the school’s information technology department. Chris immediately
zeroes in on Riley Cramer (Li Eubanks), a student of ambiguous ethnicity — she
looks African-American but her mom Jaclyn (Galyn Görg) looks like a
Mediterranean type (though imdb.com’s bio of Görg lists her as the product of a
German father and a Native American, African-American and Irish mother) and one wonders whether she’s the
product of an interracial marriage and the father who walked out on the family
in the backstory was full-blooded African-American (to the extent that anyone
actually is full-blooded African-American given how much coerced interracial
fucking was going on between women slaves and their male masters in the
ante-bellum days).
Jaclyn is a nurse who’s worked multiple shifts and stayed
away a lot to make enough money to raise Riley as a single parent, and Chris is
not only from a filthy-rich family he’s home alone a lot because his folks are
jet-setting to one exotic vacation locale or another quite often. During one of
these jaunts Chris decides to host a party and thereby ingratiate himself to
his new classmates by letting them swim in his family’s pool and help
themselves to his parents’ stash of alcoholic beverages, and he slips a drug
into Riley’s drink, then takes her to his bedroom and not only has his wicked
way with her while she’s powerless to resist but photographs the whole thing
and sends the pics first to Riley’s estranged boyfriend Matt (Cole Reinhardt),
a typical dumb jock who’s more butch than Chris but considerably less sexy (at
least to me), then to Riley herself. Riley and her mom complain to the police
but are told by Lt. Forni (Michael Paré, a name that meant nothing to me but
Charles recognized him in the credits as a young action figure in movies like Streets
of Fire and Eddie and the
Cruisers in the 1980’s; Charles said Paré’s
looks have fallen even farther than the norm for such young pretty-boys when
they hit middle age) flat-out that the Andrewses have way too much money and clout to be prosecuted for
Chris’s crimes, and if Matt’s parents try to win justice for their son’s
girlfriend, the Andrewses will tie them up in court and bankrupt them. So of
course Riley, Matt and Riley’s best female friend, Kim (Sophia Katarina Kraak),
hatch a plot to get the goods on Chris themselves. The plan is that Kim will
vamp Chris and get the information out of him by pretending to be interested in
him sexually (though as it turns out she doesn’t actually have to go to bed
with him — a disappointment for me because I was hoping we’d get to see a
soft-core porn sequence involving hot Jared Scott, who probably had a lot of
straight women and Gay men in the audience, including me, thinking, “Stalk me, honey!”), and though they have to deal with the
usual complications beloved of Lifetime writers, including people coming home
unexpectedly when they weren’t expected and Chris suddenly getting suspicious
of Kim’s real motives in cruising him even though he’s also drawn as the sort
of egomaniac who thinks no (straight) woman can resist him, eventually they get
the goods on him and figure out why he’s so interested in destroying Riley.
It
seems that way back when he was still at St. Joseph’s he did to a classmate
named Lori Nelson the same thing he did to Riley — he drugged her, raped her,
took pictures of them having sex and splashed them all over social media — with
the result that Lori was ostracized at school, denounced as a slut (and worse
things), and ultimately she committed suicide. Chris didn’t suffer any legal
consequences but was quietly told to leave St. Joseph’s, and though he got into
a school considered almost as prestigious it was still a public school and Chris freaked out that having a public
school on his résumé would hurt his 1-percent cred and might keep him out of
the very best colleges to which he felt entitled. So he freaked out and
determined to get his revenge on the person he blamed for his predicament —
Riley’s mother Jaclyn (ya remember Riley’s mother Jaclyn?), who had given Lori Nelson the rape exam the night
Chris drugged and assaulted her, who had reported this to the police and
thereby, in Chris’s egomaniac view, ruined his life. Riley, Matt and Kim
learned all this from a police file on the case they obtained from Lori
Nelson’s mother (played with an indelibly ineffable sense of overwhelmed
sadness by an actress herself named Tracy Nelson!), and in the final scene
Riley goes to her mom’s house — alone, having (like a typical Lifetime idiot
heroine) refused Matt’s offer to accompany and help protect her — and Chris
shows up intent on murdering both of them. Only, just as Chris is about to
slash Jaclyn’s throat with a straight razor (an oddly outré choice of weapon for a film both made and set in
2018), Riley pulls out a gun that’s been previously established as being in the
house and drills Chris with five perfectly spaced shots to the chest — maybe we
were supposed to assume she was on the target-shooting team at Kennedy and
that’s how she learned to be so good with a gun. At the end the other
sympathetic characters assure Riley that she did the right thing because Chris
was a monster and if he had been allowed to live he would have just kept doing
this over and over — and I couldn’t help but joke, “And 50 years from now he
could have been elected President!”
The Wrong Friend is typical Lifetime, but it’s decently acted by the
principals and well staged for suspense and thrills by director David DeCoteau.
A number of the imdb.com reviewers have come down hard on Jared Scott in the
bad-boy lead — one even wrote, “The kid playing the psycho could not act to
save his life” — but what others read as incompetence I saw as powerful
understatement. Charming and a little bit gawky, Scott makes Chris credible as
a character, showing both the superficial appeal and the underlying
spoiled-brat evil, and while writer Rockoff (almost as appropriate a name for a
Lifetime scribe as Kirby Dick and Barbara Kymlicka!) could have made more of
the class-conflict notions in his story (particularly Chris’s ability to screw
over other people with impunity because he’s confident that his parents, with
their social position as well as their limitless funds, will be able to bail
him out of whatever trouble he might get into), Scott does project the spoiled 1-percenter aspect of his
character. The only problem is that ever since Alfred Hitchcock cast Anthony
Perkins, who’d previously been an innocent boy-next-door type, as the crazy
killer in Psycho, the calm,
understated type of movie psycho performance has become almost as much a cliché
as the older type in which actors played psychos by rolling their eyes and
bellowing their lines at such intense volume you wondered why they felt they needed to shout. We’ve seen an awful lot of them on
Lifetime — and many of them have been women psychos who added perkiness to the mix — and it
doesn’t help that Jared Scott has clearly learned how to play an alienated
teenager from the same source the last three generations of young actors have:
from watching James Dean’s movies. I quite liked The Wrong Friend even though I’ll admit it didn’t have either
Christine Conradt’s humanism or the stark portrayal of class conflict and
wealthy privilege of Restless Virgins!
