Cheating for Your Life, a.k.a. Dangerous Cheaters (Cartel Pictures, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. I watched a Lifetime “premiere” movie called Cheating for Your Life – though imdb.com listed it as Dangerous Cheaters – and it followed the depressing pattern that if Lifetime’s Saturday movie was unusually good, its Sunday movie would be either outright terrible or at least formulaic and dull. First of all, the term “cheating” in the title does not mean having sexual relations with someone other than your husband, wife or significant other. Instead, it means fraud in connection with academic testing – in this case the all-important Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) that in large measure determines what college you get to go to after you finish high school. The principal character is Kaley Parker (Francesca Xuereb – her last name sounds more like an Aztec goddess than a normal high-school student who doesn’t look particularly ethnic or “of color”), who doesn’t have to worry about the SAT because she’s an academic whiz.

Her rather cute boyfriend Jackson (Daniel Grogan),who has enough of a baby face he looks at least somewhat more believable as a high-school student than most of the cast (if my pet peeve about Lifetime movies is how often characters who are supposed to be biologically related are played by actors who look almost totally unlike each other, my husband Charles’ pet peeve is being asked to believe that actors clearly at least in their mid-20’s are supposed to be high-school students), even kids her about being such a nerd. Of course Kaley doesn’t have to worry about her own SAT score – she gets 1260 out of a possible 1600 – but she starts to get suspicious when a number of other students in her class got scores in the high 1400’s, including Millie Gant (Karalynn Dunton), who lords it over Kayla that her score came in 200 points higher than Kayla’s even though Kayla had kidded Millie for being less than bright.

It turns out that the whole scheme is an elaborate plot to game the test by substituting mostly correct answers for the ones the students actually turned in, and the mastermind of the scheme is Steven Gant (Shawn Christian), Millie’s single-parent father, who bribed test proctor Clark Jensen (Daniel Hall) to substitute good test scores for the mediocre results actually turned in by Millie, Monica (Tori Keeth) and the others who paid him bribe money for what was supposedly just an online prep course to improve your SAT scores legitimately. I’ll give writer Brooke Purdy credit for one thing – she worked out a plot device by which the students benefiting from the scheme don’t know that cheating was involved: they think they earned their own superior scores and improved via their own merits and the killer prep course Steven, under the anagram “Nik Gevest,” offered online. (Charles pointed out one plot hole: the scheme could only work if students were taking the SAT on paper, the way they did it in my own high-school days. Today virtually all standardized tests are taken online on special computers linked to the people giving out the tests.)

The scheme unravels because one of the students, Clea Braverman (Francesca Keller – so two people in this cast have “Francesca” as a first name!), stole a ring from her mother (Andi Wagner) and gave it to Steven to finance her enrollment in his “prep course” – only mom regarded it as a family heirloom (she had got it from her own mother and she had intended to give it to Clea on her wedding day) and demands it back. Clea sees the ring on Millie’s finger, puts two and two together, and threatens to expose the whole scheme – only Daddy Steven pushes her off a balcony to her death at a party he let Millie host for the students he’d “helped.” Later he tries to murder Kayla’s cutie-pie boyfriend Jackson twice – Kayla has acquired Clea’s laptop and is sure the secret is on it, if she can only figure out how to open it, and Jackson has enough computer skills and overall smarts to guess Clea’s password correctly and get in – once with his car and then in the hospital where Jackson, injured but not dead, ended up after Steven’s previous murder attempt failed. The second time Steven tries to kill Jackson, he disguises himself as a doctor and goes into his room, and his attack looks so lethal it’s something of a surprise that Jackson turns up later, very much alive, to attend his and Kayla’s graduation ceremony (where it turns out they’re going to the same college so they can continue to see each other).

The police officer that arrests Steven Gant at the end is Detective Carl Becker (Brian Ames), yet another cute guy in this movie, who’d been making goo-goo eyes at Kayla’s mother Fiona (Heather McComb, top-billed) so much I figured (wrongly) that writer Purdy was setting it up for them to get together at the end. The director was former actress Brittany Underwood, who like a lot of other Lifetime directors knows how to do suspense and near-Gothic horror – the “teaser” scene of Kayla being stalked in the school gym on the night of her big high-school volleyball game was directed with real flair (though typically for Lifetime we have no idea what’s going on in this scene until towards the end of the film, and after the “teaser” we get a common Lifetime chyron, “One Month Earlier”) – but she’s one Lifetime woman director on whom I would wish a better script next time, particularly one which wouldn’t be so sudden about making Steven Gant a villain just as we’ve more or less liked him all movie, though given that he’s literally “too good to be true” I should have guessed he’d be the bad guy well before I did (which was still well before the movie ended)!