Fallen Angels Murder Club: Friends to Die For (Brain Power Studio, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Yesterday I watched two movies in a row on Lifetime and the first was actually quite good: Fallen Angels Murder Club: Friends to Die For, written and directed by Rhonda Baraka based on a series of books by R. Franklin James about a book club comprised entirely of ex-felons. The clunky title is explained because Lifetime produced a second movie based on the characters, Fallen Angels Book Club: Heroes and Felons, which will air next Saturday. The central character of Fallen Angels Murder Club: Friends to Die For is Hollis Morgan (Toni Braxton, who also executive-produced), true name Rebecca Lynley, who served three years in prison for a scheme to sell false promissory notes that was actually concocted by her ex-husband, Bill Lynley (Keith D. Robinson), in association with Rory Sharma (Raoul Bhaneja) and a mystery third party known as “Achilles.” The three guys escaped legal jeopardy and made Rebecca the fall person, and now she’s using a different name and working as a paralegal for attorney Michael Caldwell (Sean Jones). Michael is encouraging her to take the bar exam and become a full-fledged lawyer, but even in Philadelphia (where this takes place) aren’t there laws preventing ex-felons from being admitted to practice law?

Now Hollis is running the book club, which not surprisingly specializes in murder mysteries, and Rory is part of the club along with Avery Mitchell (Eddie Cibrian), Abby Caldwell (Lisa Berry), Miller Thornton (Rainbow Sun Francks – that’s a man, by the way), and Gene Donovan (Yanic von Truesdale). Alas, Rory is found dead in his palatial mansion (how he paid for it isn’t quite clear, but it soon becomes clear that he’s one felon who isn’t quite so “ex”), killed by poisoned brandy and cigars like one of the characters in the book the book club just read. The police assign two detectives to the case, Jonathan Faber (Henderson Wade) and Monica Lincoln (Kaitlyn Lane); Monica is the “bad cop,” coming into the case with the seemingly unshakable conviction that Hollis is the killer, but Jonathan not only plays the “good cop” but seems, judging from the long, smoldering looks he keeps giving her, to be attracted to Hollis and therefore disinclined to believe she’s a murderess. Eventually Abby disappears and is presumed dead – though she reappears midway through the movie – and Hollis’s ex-husband Bill, who remember set her up for the fall in the first place but is now trying to get her to flee the country with him, invites Hollis to a deserted warehouse that’s used as the site of raves but then is shot and killed right after she tells him she’s not going and leaves him behind.

The film’s best scene is a sort of I-am-Spartacus moment in which everyhone in the book club (including a Black Gay man who admits he was having an affair with a man on the “down low”) admits that Rory was blackimailikng them and therefore they all had a motive to kill him. Eventually the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Hollis’s too-good-to-be-true boss, Michael Caldwell, which Hollis discovers through getting Avery to install a tracking device on his car. He was the mysterious “Achilles” who was funding the fake promissory-note scheme in the first place and he hired Hollis at Rory’s behest. Hollis confronts Michael in a parking garage and things look dark for Our Heroine until Detective Faber comes in at the last minute, alerted by the tracking device on Michael’s car, and not only saves the day but afterwards writes a letter in support of Hollis’s legal petition to have her felony conviction expunged. She draws a woman judge who at first seems unwilling to grant her petition, but the letter from Detective Faber changes her mind and she grants the petition. The movie ends with Hollis and Faber making bedroom eyes at each other across the courtroom and seemingly on their way to becoming a couple (which seems like a good thing if only because her previous taste in men has been terrible).

Fallen Angels Book Club: Friends to Die For isn’t a masterpiece, but it does have an insouciant charm reminiscent of the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s that dominated mystery filmmaking until they were abruptly driven off the screen by the success of the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon and the start of the film noir cycle – and I’m definitely looking forward to the next film in the series and to whatever this particularly talented writer-director, Rhonda Baraka, does next. She already made one of the better recent Lifetime movies, Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, a reworking of Jane Austen’s classic into a film about Black one-percenters in Atlanta that, among other things, was welcome in that it acknowledged that Black one-percenters exist.