Jailbreak Lovers (Novus Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was Jailbreak Lovers, based on a true story that happened in Kansas in 2006. Bored housewife Toby Lynn Young (Catherine Bell), whose husband Pat puts her through some of the indicia of domineering masculinity – at least he fetches his own beer from their refrigerator instead of making her do it for him, but he watches sports on TV and couldn’t be less interested when she attempts to strike up a conversation with him – loses her job and sets up a volunteer dog rescue operation. The warden of the local prison seeks her out to lead a course in dog training for the prisoners, in hopes that this will help rehabilitate both the dogs and the prisoners. Up until then Toby has been totally straight-arrow: she never smoked, never drank, married the first (and only) man she ever dated, has been with him for 30 years (they have a grown son, Adam, who’s a senior at college, and we get the impression that Adam’s conception marked the last time she ahd hubby Pat ever had sex), and has never been in any trouble with the law. All that changes when she meets John Maynard (Tom Stevens), who’s serving a life sentence for murder. He was involved in a car-jacking in which the owner of the car was actually sleeping in it, and according to his own account his accomplice actually killed the owner, but since he was part of the commission of a crime that involved murder, he was convicted too.

John and Toby “meet cute” when he saves her from another prisoner who’s upset with Toby because she had promised to let his sister adopt one of the dogs, but she wasn’t able to reach the sister and the dog ultimately ended up on the open market. John sneaks up behind the other prisoner and gets him in a headlock, and confronted with John’s headlong masculinity – especially as compared to her husband, who has a job as captain of a firefighting company, which keeps him away from home for long hours and wears him out so much their nights in bed consist of both of them lying on their backs looking bored – she gets a crush on him. They start grabbing every chance they have to touch, even as minimally as locking fingers together, and ultimately graduate to a few frantic open-mouthed kisses. The story is backgrounded by serious illnesses in the family of both Toby and her Black best friend and partner in the dog rescue operation: Toby’s father gets cancer and goes through an arduous regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, while her Black friend’s mother has diverticulitis that’s getting worse, which forces her to stop going to the prison with Toby and thereby facilitates the growing attraction between her and John. (Incidentally John’s last name is spelled “Maynard” in the movie but “Manard” in real life.)

Eventually the two plot John’s escape from prison, which they accomplish by having John lose 20 pounds so he can fit into a box, which he then sneaks into a carrying case meant for a large dog, and Toby loads the case along with other, smaller containers that actually contain dogs. There’s some nail-biting suspense as she drives out of the prison with John in the back of her van (which reminded me of how Lauren Bacall helped the unjustly imprisoned Humphrey Bogart escape in the 1947 film Dark Passage) before the two of them successfully evade the police and guards and hit the open road. Following a pre-arranged plan, they ditch the dog rescue van in a storage garage she rented because it had no security cameras (when the police interrogate the garage owner afterwards, he rather ruefully said he’d intended to install the cameras the next month), and drive off in a grey SUV she bought by cashing out both her and her husband’s 401(k)’s. She and John drive out to a cabin in Tennessee and spend what the real Toby Young (now Toby Dorr because she remarried following her 27-month prison term for facilitating John’s escape) later described as “12 wonder-filled days” during which they had a lot of sex and did a lot of errands, including a trip to a guitar store in Nashville because John was an amateur guitarist – the first thing John does once he’s out of prison is grab a ukulele he had “inside” and serenade Toby with “It Had to Be You,” theme song from the 1939 film The Roaring Twenties, also a crime movie.

The two of them are able to move about surprisingly well despite the sheer size of the manhunt (and womanhunt) local police, Kansas state troopers and U.S. marshals have organized to find them. Then they’re successfully traced to the remote cabin in the woods because Toby made a mistake: she had the registration papers for the SUV sent not to a mail drop, but to her own address in the cabin. The police report on them calls them “armed and dangerous” because among the possessions they have with them are two handguns which John stole from Toby’s husband Pat after he let himself in to the home while Toby wasn’t looking. Ultimately they are caught when the police and various authorities set up a blockade of the road, and while the real John Manard lost control of the truck he was driving at 100 miles an hour and crashed into a tree, the fictional John Maynard (as in “Keynes”?) pulls to a stop and gives himself up. Ultimately John is re-incarcerated for 10 more years and put into a so-called “supermax” prison that is supposed to be escape-proof, while Toby serves her 27 months, is released and ultimately remarries – as does her ex-husband Pat. (Ya remember Pat?)

That aspect of the story reminded me of the “Flitcraft” tale in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, in which Sam Spade reminisces about an earlier case involving a man named Flitcraft, who disappeared one day, leaving his wife behind but well cared for. When Spade finally traced him, Flitcraft explains that one day as he was on his way to work he was almost struck dead by a piece of wall falling from a building. This convinced him of the impermanence of life and the need to get the most out of it while you still can, only by the time Spade found him he’d drifted back into his old routine, resumed his career in a different city, married a similar-looking woman and settled back into the life he’d led before. “He accustomed himself to buildings falling, and then he accustomed himself to buildings not falling,” Spade says. Likewise Toby Young Dorr accustomed herself to living on the dark side and having a flaming affair with a dangerous convict, and then when it ended it seems she pretty much went back to the sort of life she’d led before. “I white-knuckled my life until desperation coerced a change,” she wrote in her essay. “The wiser choice would have been to courageously and intentionally change before my life imploded. However, life’s beauty is not destroyed by tragedy; contrarily, it is enhanced by our perseverance through hardships.”

The makers of Jailbreak Lovers – screenwriters Anne-Marie Hess and Jodie Burke, and director Katie Boland – made one mistake that I found annoying: they periodically cut into the story to show scenes of Toby, John and Toby’s Black friend being interviewed retrospectively about the experience. That wasn’t necessarily a bad dramatic device, but it seemed to me really pointless and dull. They also cast both Toby and John with considerably hotter-looking actors than the real-life characters (whom we got to see in a Behind the Headlines mini-documentary after the film), but that’s all too typical of movies that allegedly dramatize real stories. Aside from that, Jailbreak Lovers is an effective piece of entertainment; it’s true that it’s not until 85 minutes into this two-hour (including commercials) TV movie that we finally get a soft-core porn sex scene between the principals, but the frustration of waiting is actually part of the plot. All too much of the movie is about the sheer torment of feeling a sexual attraction for someone and at the same time being hopelessly unable to fulfill it – though before John’s escape Toby smuggles in a cell phone for him and he says he wants it to hear her voice before he goes to sleep, and I was a bit surprised that director Boland didn’t do anything to suggest he was jacking off to the sound of her voice. (That could have been done even within the restrictions of basic cable.)

One welcome irony is that even though their relationship lasts only 12 days of connubial bliss, it’s not all bliss: not surprisingly, especially given what he was in prison for in the first place, John turns out to be hot-tempered and domineering, able to turn on a dime from hot, sexy lover to vicious bastard and back. I quite like Jailbreak Lovers; it delivers some of the lubricious titillation we expected from the promos but it also had some of the real depth Lifetime and its producers tend to let creep into their movies, especially when they’re more or less based on true stories.