Road Trip Hostage (Goodflix, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 29) Lifetime showed an unusually good “premiere” movie, Road Trip Hostage, quite convincingly directed by Kaila York and written by John F. Hayes with considerably more dimensional characters than the Lifetime norm. The promos had made it look like a young woman was taken hostage by a no-account psycho, but the film was considerably more psychologically and morally complex than that. The young woman is Emma Moreno (Veronica Ramirez), who’s living at home with her mother Hillary (Chala Savino), only they’re arguing because Emma’s only career ambition is to be a professional dancer, while Hillary insists that if Emma is going to live under her roof, she’s going to have to stay in college and study geology. Emma can dance in her off-hours but college must remain paramount. Emma has already blown several auditions because the time demands of her school work left her with no time or energy to rehearse, though at the start of this story she finally lands a dance gig. (It would have helped if the casting director had located an actress to play Emma who could dance spectacularly; as it is, she looks good but not that good, and our friend Garry Hobbs, who was watching the movie with us, told the old joke that one of the worst things that can happen is if you have some talent.) Then the film cuts to a swanky straight pick-up bar and we meet the other half of our unlikely couple, Rick Frye (Luke Charles Stafford), a super-spoiled rich kid whose dad, attorney Charles Frye (billed on imdb.com as “Circus-Szalewski”), has finally had enough of his lack of ambition and his free-loading on the family fortune.

Unbeknownst to Rick, dad has canceled his credit cards, leading to an embarrassing situation when he’s ready to leave the bar and all his cards are declined. The hot blonde bimbo he was going to take home with him dumps him and Rick slinks home in a fancy red sports car that, like the T-Bird in the Beach Boys’ hit “Fun, Fun, Fun,” daddy is about to take away from him. As Charles awaits his prodigal son’s return, he gets more and more drunk on a liquid from a crystal decanter, and when Rick finally comes home the two men have a confrontation that ends with Rick grabbing the decanter and fatally clubbing his dad with it. Charles’s trophy wife Linda (Nicole Andrews), who’s obviously Rick’s stepmother since she looks about his age (Rick’s real mom died some years before, as did Emma’s dad), freaks out and calls the police despite Rick’s attempt to grab the phone away from her, and it momentarily looks like Rick is going to kill her as well (though he doesn’t). The meet-ugly between Emma and Rick occurs at the home of Emma’s friend Katy (Rachel Turner), where she’s going to stay until she can find a place of her own because she’s finally decided to leave her mom’s place so she can dump college and dance full-time. Katy points out Rick as a neighbor of hers and Emma instantly decides he’s hot, so she eagerly accepts when he asks her to drive him to the airport. Only just before they arrive Rick hears on Emma’s car radio that the police have discovered his dad’s body and are after him. Rick immediately orders Emma to drive him heaven knows where, he hasn’t decided yet.

One of the things that makes Road Trip Hostage better than most Lifetime movies is that Rick is a conflicted character, not a hardened criminal but a basically good kid who was spoiled rotten and who struck back after his dad ordered him off the gravy train. The police search for him is led by a Latina detective named Lisa Ramirez (Gabriella Biziou), and she notices the bad job he’s doing as a fugitive, going north when he’s trying to reach the Mexican border (the film is set in the L.A. area; we know that from the California license plates on the cars and the “San Fernando Valley” sign we see in one scene) and doubling back on his own trail. Needless to say, mom wants to be in on the chase because it’s her daughter Rick is holding hostage, and Detective Ramirez doesn’t want her around because she’ll only gum up the works. Rick and Emma stop at a convenience store, where Rick buys some energy drinks and caffeine pills to keep himself awake on the long drive, while Emma shoplifts a package of sleeping pills with the intent of drugging Rick’s drink and either getting away or turning him in. As I just noted on the “Goofs” section of the film’s imdb.com page, she's able to reach into the bottle and grab them immediately, which could not happen. Modern-day medications are packaged so tightly and have so many safety seals before you can access the pills, there is no way Emma could have just opened the pill bottle once and extracted them. Emma’s plan is foiled when Rick notices the taste of the sleeping pills in his energy drink, and for most of the rest of the trip he insists on keeping Emma bound and gagged. The two stop at a motel, and the clerk (a marvelous I’ve-seen-it-all performance by Lisa Long) catches on to their real situation.

Though Rick offers to pay for the room in cash, the clerk insists on a credit card “for incidentals,”and Emma uses her card – which triggers an alert on her mom's phone so both momand the police have a clue as to her whereabouts, though mom sleeps through the alert because it comes in at 2:15 a.m. The clerk also asks them whether they want the room by the hour or for all night (it’s that kind of a motel). The clerk asks Emma silently, “Are you all right?,” and Emma’s mouth forms the word, “No.” The clerk tries to call 911 and stall Rick long enough until the police can get there, but Rick catches on and speeds off, running down the clerk just as she’s stepped outside her office to call the cops. Rick realizes the police now have the car’s license number, and he insists on stealing another car – only he has no idea of how to break into a modern car and the only thing he can do is carjack a vehicle (a BMW, though this is probably not the sort of product placement BMW would have wanted) from a middle-aged woman, which creates yet another witness who can report him to the police. Ultimately the cops and mom track down the fugitives to a wooded area, where Rick tries to get away from a police roadblock by turning the car off-road, only he drives over a scrap of wood that takes out its radiator. Emma tries to run away but Rick catches her, though she sneaks up behind him and clobbers him on the head with a rock – a nice bit of parallelism given that that’s the way Rick took out his dad. Eventually Rick tries to kill Emma with the knife he’s been holding on her all movie, but Emma pleads with him to spare her and ultimately he does so, and somewhat surprisingly he’s taken alive and into custody at the end instead of dying in a police shoot-out.

Road Trip Hostage is unusually sensitively written, and one of the things I liked about Hayes’ script is that both his central characters are alienated teens who’ve been raised by domineering single parents who haven’t bothered to listen to what they really wanted. It occurred to me that if the film had been made in the mid-1950’s Rick would have been a perfect part for James Dean. Luke Charles Stafford has something of Dean’s knack for switching back and forth between tough guy and vulnerable boy-man in they same scene, and it helps that we get to see him topless in two scenes and he has pecs to die for even though Stafford’s casting follows the all too familiar pattern in Lifetime movies of having the hottest guy in the cast be the villain. With a more morally complicated and conflicted script than the Lifetime norm, and expert suspense direction by Kaila York (three of her four previous directorial credits – Home Is Where the Killer is, Most Likely to Murder and My Nightmare Office Affair – are thrillers), Road Trip Hostage is an unusually good Lifetime movie, the sort of diamond-in-the-rough we longtime Lifetime watchers hope for and for which we’re willing to sit through a lot of God-awful sludge.