by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was Mile High
Escorts, a bit of titillation from
Stargazer Films and Beta Film dealing with a super-private airline run by a
rich old guy named Franklin (Steve Coulter) who built up a fortune doing heaven
knows what after his dad worked
40 years as an aeronautics engineer for an aircraft company that laid him off
and sent him on his way with a trophy-like statue of a plane in flight which
Frederick keeps on his desk as a reminder of “the rewards of a lack of
ambition.” With the money he made doing whatever his business was (writers Anthony Del Negro, Shane and
Zach O’Brien, and Jeremy Hentschel couldn’t have been less interested in
telling us) Frederick started a private airline to fly the ultra-rich to and
around Europe with flight attendants who were also “concierges” and — though he
didn’t necessarily require them to have sex with the clients — he made it clear
that this would be the most desirable outcome in terms of keeping the customers
satisfied. When the film opens Frederick is dying of lung cancer and his son
Erik (Griffin Freeman) is anxious to inherit the business and turn it into an
open whorehouse with wings, ending daddy’s policy of not forcing the flight attendants to do things they wouldn’t
want to do.
The film’s central character is Lauren (Saxon Sharbino), who at the
start is a flight attendant for a normal airline until she hits a triple
whammy: her employers cut her hours in half, she catches her boyfriend screwing
another woman and (since his parents co-signed the lease to their apartment) he throws her out, and when she moves back in with her dad and her younger sister
Shannon (Ella Frazee) she finds they’re behind on all their bills and are about
to lose the house she grew up in. So she and her friend and colleague Ashley
(Kara Royster) accept the recruitment by Hannah (Christina Moore) to fly on
Franklin’s airline and minister to the high-end customers’ needs for more than
coffee, tea or milk. Hannah is in some ways the most interesting character in
this committee-written story, directed by Sam Irvin; she’s pretty obviously
Franklin’s mistress but she’s also a basically decent person and it’s clear
Franklin wants to disinherit Erik and leave his fortune and his unusual airline
to her. Alas, before that can happen Erik kills his father by withholding the
oxygen mask he needs to breathe (I joked that someone on the writing committee must have seen
The Little Foxes) and, when that doesn’t
dispatch him fast enough, covering his nose and “burking” him. Meanwhile,
Lauren and Ashley have started flying on the private plane and their first
clients are traveling business partners Harold (Matt Mercurio) and Thomas (Esteban
Benito). Once again, a Lifetime casting director (in this case Anthony Del
Negro, who cast this film as well as co-writing it) has made a basic mistake in
a prostitution story: he’s cast the johns with genuinely attractive, sexy
actors whom the women would probably want to have sex with even if they weren’t getting paid to do so. Ashley takes to Harold — and
to the sexual services that are an unspoken but clearly understood part of her
employment deal — like the proverbial duck to water, but the more virtuous
Lauren gets to the point of an underwear-clad romp with Thomas in his hotel
room but draws back from the actual down ’n’ dirty.
Thomas doesn’t seem to mind
all that much and eventually he even proposes marriage to Lauren — obviously
the writers were thinking Pretty Woman here — but Mile High Escorts quickly turns into one of those Lifetime movies in which the writers
simply don’t know when to stop. Erik, it turns out, is not only a hard-nosed
capitalist but an out-and-out psycho; in the opening scene he killed a woman
named Jenny (Chloe Carabasi) because she’d threatened to leave the airline and
report it to the police (which
police? Its operations are so far-flung, from Louisville and Frederick’s home
“somewhere in Maine” to Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin, it’s not clear which
country would have jurisdiction). Later he whacks Hannah over the head with
that little plane statue his dad kept on his desk (following the sacred
Chekhovian principle that if you introduce an object in act one you have to do something significant with it later on) — apparently he has a
well-oiled operation for getting rid of all the corpses he creates — and at the
end he moves against Lauren and Ashley when he learns they’re recording their
interactions with his clients on their smartphones and sending the recordings
to Lauren’s sister Shannon (ya remember Lauren’s sister Shannon?) to store on her laptop as a backup. One of the
creepier clients Lauren records is Paul (Adam Huss), who’s already tried to
rape her — in a scene that naturally was a key part of the promos for this film
he says, “I paid hundreds of dollars for you, and you won’t even give me a
kiss?” — and who turns out to be an old boarding-school buddy of Erik’s. This
time there’s an altercation in which Ashley kills Paul — again with a blunt
instrument — and Lauren calls her fiancé Thomas to help them get rid of the
body and evade the gendarmerie
(we’re in Paris again).
Only — surprise! (well, not really) — Thomas turns out to be in on it with Erik, who
tells Our Heroines that he’s sent a hit man to kill Lauren’s dad and sister and
destroy the backup copies of the recordings, while he and Erik (Thomas
identifies himself as another one
of Erik’s boarding-school buddies, which makes us wonder if people Erik went to
school with as kids are the whole customer base of his airline). There’s a
fight to the finish just before the plane is supposed to take off in which both
Erik and Thomas are mortally wounded — Thomas gets a sad farewell to Lauren in
which he tries to convince her he loved her all along (this guy goes through
more changes of loyalty than Gollum!) but she’s not convinced, and neither are
we. Then there’s a typical tag scene set six months later in Marseille, France
(like the makers of the 1944 film Passage to Marseille, the makers of this one leave off the final “s” from
the city’s name), in which Ashley and Lauren receive a video call from Lauren’s
sister Shannon, who’s attending college in the U.S. while Ashley and Lauren
have decided to stay in France and study there, Lauren studying European
cultural history and Ashley studying fashion design. Lauren, it’s previously
been established, already knows how to speak French, and Ashley is rather
anxious about her need to learn it before her classes start. Mile
High Escorts is an O.K. Lifetime thriller,
a bit too skimpy on the soft-core porn for my taste (though I loved the scene in which we got to see Esteban Benito
topless in bed; he has pecs to die for and if I were in bed with him, I couldn’t keep my hands off
him!) and trailing off into hysterical over-the-top melodrama (I found it
especially unbelievable that Lauren’s dad manages to overpower a hired killer
half his age and shoot the man with the killer’s own gun) and not the film it
could have been if the writers had ditched the psycho stuff and made the
conflicts more internal as the women wrestle with the moral implications of
their “services.”
