by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My husband
Charles was home for most of the next Lifetime movie on their schedule, and it
was a considerably better and more compelling one even though it got saddled by
Lifetime’s titling department with one of the worst “handles” ever put on a
movie of any sort: A
Deadly Price for a Pretty Face.
The original title from writer Mitch Chamberlain and director Mark Gantt was Model
Citizen, which would
have been a far finer and more ironic name — but about the last thing Lifetime wants on their movie
titles is irony. The plot deals with Amanda Archer (Cassie Browarth), who’s
working as a model to support herself and her pre-pubescent daughter Zooey
(pronounced “Zoë”) (Marie Wagenman) while she attends nursing school in hopes
of building a better life for the two of them. Only Amanda’s ex-husband Nick
(Hans Christopher), who seems to combine the love, warmth and understanding of
Michael Douglas in The Wars of the Roses and Patrick Bergin in Sleeping with the Enemy, is bound and determined to take Zooey
away from Angela and win full custody. He thinks he can do it because he’s a
big-shot lawyer, well paid by a local hospital for his skill in finding
loopholes that can get rid of sick, indigent patients who can’t pay their bills
and have run out their insurance, and therefore he can persuade the family-court
judge hearing his custody case that he and his new trophy wife Clara (Diana
Villegas) would be better parents for Zooey than her mom. Both Amanda and Clara
note the irony that Nick never wanted kids with either of his wives, but since Zooey exists
he’s determined to have her if only to traumatize Angela and make her life more
miserable.
Nick hits on the idea of having two crooks, recent parolee and
alcoholic Tyler Walton (Shawn Pyfrom) and his younger brother Shawn (Kevin
Fonteyne), kidnap Angela and demand $150,000 ransom — which he will agree to
pay, but only if
Angela agrees to give up Zooey and allow him full custody. What makes this
considerably more interesting than most Lifetime movies is the depth of
characterization writer Chamberlain puts into the characters, particularly the
two crooks, who though we’re told they’re brothers have an interesting
emotional relationship similar to the one between Lawrence Tierney and Elisha
Cook, Jr. in the 1947 RKO “B” Born to Kill. Angela got kidnapped in the first place
when Shawn posed as a photographer representing a big model agency in New York
and lured her to an office building for a “photo shoot” — she got suspicious
and tried to run, but he caught her and he and Tyler grabbed her, but Zooey saw
the whole thing, including the Chucky-style clown masks the two kidnappers were wearing (though
Shawn didn’t put his mask on in time and Zooey got to see his face) because she
was in her baby sitter’s car at the time. The kidnappers hold Angela at an
out-of-the-way location and we learn that in addition to being a parolee, Tyler
is also a heavy drinker and Shawn is worried that his alcohol consumption is
going to get them both caught. In one scene a small-town sheriff pulls up next
to the Walton brothers at a stop sign, stares at Tyler as if he’s seen that
face somewhere, then
thinks better of it and drives off — while Tyler nervously fingers a gun, ready
to shoot the sheriff if the sheriff makes any law-enforcement moves on him. At
one point we see Shawn nervously get out a hypodermic syringe and a
professionally packaged ampule of something, and at first we assume he’s a
prescription drug addict — but later we learn that he’s suffering from Stage IV
cancer and the drug is something he has to shoot up to control the side effects
of his chemotherapy.
In fact, the entire kidnap plot was staged by the Walton
brothers to get the money for Shawn’s treatments after the hospital he was
using — the one Nick Archer represents in court — said they wouldn’t provide
him any more treatments now that he’d exhausted his insurance. At times this
seems like a morality play, with the moral being, “If we had Medicare for All,
it would reduce crime” — indeed, when Tyler actually says on the soundtrack
that they wouldn’t have had to kidnap Amanda if America’s health-care system
wasn’t so screwed up, I couldn’t help but joke, “They could have called this When
Bernie-Bros Go Really, Really
Bad.” While all this is
happening — including Tyler having to keep himself and Shawn in a dinky small
town longer than anticipated because it’s going to take a day longer than they
thought for the drugstore (a Rexall’s, which startled Charles and I because we
both thought Rexall had gone out of business ages ago) to contact Shawn’s
doctor and verify the prescription; and Angela trying to get into Shawn’s good
graces and get him to let her go by agreeing to give him his shot and use her
knowledge as a nursing student to do it properly and painlessly — a pair of
police detectives, a tall, heavy-set, middle-aged white man, Carl Coomler
(Jason Coviello), and his almost as large Black woman partner, lverez (Amber
Lynn Ashley), are doing the best they can to trace the case. Tyler is also
getting restive about how long Nick is making him wait before he pays the ransom,
and at several points he has what he calls his “Plan B”: to take photos of
Amanda in bondage and upload them to a “dark Web” site called Night Terrors so he can sell her to a human trafficker
for sexual slavery. When the cops finally identify the Walton brothers as the
kidnappers, they give a press conference and publicize it to the media — and
when Tyler, having finally got Shawn’s prescription, stops off at a bar for a
drink he sees the story come out on the bar TV, immediately pulls out his gun and
holds the whole bar hostage. The bartender tries to shoot Tyler with the
shotgun he has behind the bar, but Tyler — though wounded — manages not only to
escape but grab the shotgun.
Meanwhile, back at their hideout, Amanda is trying
to keep Shawn alive while Tyler is late coming back with Shawn’s treatment, and
it’s pretty clear that neither
Walton brother is long for this world — they’re both going to die rather than
face justice — and Shawn dies after he takes his brother’s shotgun blast,
intended for Amanda, while Tyler gets picked off by Amanda with his own pistol,
which she’d got away from him. (Charles questioned how someone who isn’t a
well-practiced shot could fire a pistol at long range and kill anybody, particularly with the perfect bullet
pattern she gets, but maybe in addition to taking self-defense classes,
something she mentioned doing earlier in the movie, she took classes at a
shooting range as well.) Though the title is not only obnoxious but a “cheat” —
Tyler actually spends very little time trying to merchandise Amanda as a sex
slave on the “dark Web,” and his efforts in that direction are blown when
Shawn, a basically decent guy in thrall to his criminal brother, smashes their
computer’s router so Tyler can’t
stay in contact with the human-trafficking site — A Deadly Price for a
Pretty Face is actually
a quite good thriller, with legitimately complex emotional characters,
excellent acting (especially by Shawn Pyfrom as Tyler — he’s good enough here,
strongly reminiscent in his appearance of Erik Estrada on the 1970’s TV series CHiPs, I’d like to see him in a sympathetic
role sometime! — and Hans Christopher as Nick, vividly projecting the
character’s Trump-like arrogance and conviction that he can do anything he wants and the law can’t touch him
because he is the
law, or at least part of it — he reminded me of Donald Trump and also Daniel
Broderick, the San Diego attorney who in 1989 was killed, along with his new
wife, by the ex-wife he’d used the courts to punish and make her life as miserable
as possible) and a well-constructed script that has us rooting for the good
guys even as we understand
the not-so-good ones. This is the kind of film habitual Lifetime-watchers like
me wait and hope for from this network!
