by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The first of Lifetime’s “premiere” movies last night was one
of the worst things I’ve ever seen on the network! Judging from the title, Fatal
Defense, I was expecting a story in which a
woman defense attorney gets a man acquitted of a terrible crime, then realizes
he’s actually guilty and tries to nail him for something else, while of course
he finds out and tries to kill her. No such luck: instead it was a story of a
woman, Arden Walsh (Ashley Scott), terrorized by — get this: her
martial-arts instructor. Arden is living in
a nice suburban home and raising her eight-year-old daughter Emma (Sophie
Guest) as a single parent — dad bailed on them for reasons that are never quite
explained beyond that he liked to argue and she didn’t (he was an attorney and
after they broke up he married another lawyer, so Arden jokes that now he gets to
argue all the time) — when a burglar in a ski mask breaks into her home when
both she and the daughter are there. The burglar brandishes the sort of knife
you’d use to cut fish open and take their guts out prior to cooking them, and
threatens Arden with it — and Arden hears her sick daughter (she has a cold)
asking for a glass of water and tells the burglar she’d better get the girl
some water before she gets suspicious. Amazingly, director John Murlowski and
writer Steven Palmer Peterson expect us to believe that a) the burglar buys
this and lets Arden out of his sight, and b) once out of the burglar’s direct
control Arden does absolutely nothing (like call the police on her cell phone —
this is 2017, after all, so she undoubtedly has one) to get help, while c) the
daughter notices nothing wrong until the burglar leaves and Emma finds her mom
strapped to a chair with duct tape. (At first I thought the guy was not only
going to steal from her but rape her and the duct tape was to do S/M-style
bondage, but no such luck.)
Thinking she’s actually giving Arden good advice,
her sister Gwen (Laurie Fortier) advises her to take a self-defense class, and
the instructor turns out to be a muscular hunk named Logan Chase (David Cade).
Well, any veteran Lifetime watcher knows what that means: just about every reasonably attractive male
in a Lifetime movie turns out to be a black-hearted psycho villain, and Logan
is no exception. He runs his class with a visceral intensity and a line of
verbal abuse a military drill sergeant might have regarded as too extreme,
though instead of picking on Arden he seems to be taking a shine to her and we
wonder if he’s going to form a demented crush on her. Only the first time
they’re making eyes at each other and she seems willing to have sex with him,
instead of responding as any normal straight male would he grabs her, turns her
around and ties her hands behind her back, explaining later that the point of
him doing this is to teach her never
to let her guard down, no matter how safe she may feel. Later he actually ties
her up, kidnaps her and throws her in the trunk of his car, then challenges her
to figure out how to escape. Naturally on this one she does complain to the police, but the woman detective
investigating the case says that because she signed a release form agreeing to
be subjected to his “extreme” training methods, she really doesn’t have a case
against him — at least not one the authorities would be willing to prosecute.
Logan explains that Arden let him down by not figuring out how to escape: she
was supposed to realize that her wrists were thin enough she could work her way
out of the restraints tying her arms together, and then figured out a way to
pop the trunk open from inside so when the car stopped, she could escape. At this
point we’re beginning to wonder whether the martial-arts instructor from hell
was also the burglar who targeted her initially — an impression reinforced by
shots of a ski-masked figure who turns out to be Logan skulking around her
house — but in about the one genuinely surprising twist in Peterson’s
otherwise mind-numblingly predictable script Logan actually breaks into the
home of the real burglar, who turns out to be a bald-headed schlub with a tendency to revisit the scenes of his past
crimes to find out how the people he targeted are doing now that he’s taken
away their ability to take their personal safety for granted. “I want to see
how I’ve changed them,” he boasts.
Of course he catches Logan in his home and
thinks he’ll be able to take out Logan and preserve his ill-gotten gains (which
are lying about in plain view all over the place, by the way), but instead
Logan overpowers him and then
offers him a bankroll if he’ll sneak back into Arden’s place and, without
waking her or otherwise letting her know he’s there, plant a packet of illegal
recreational drugs in her bedroom closet “because I have to do something to
discredit her in the eyes of the police.” Only she wakes up and drives him
away, and later Logan kills him. Eventually Logan gives us what in writer
Peterson’s mind passes for an explanation of why he is how he is — it seems
that one day he and his wife were driving through the Angeles National Forest
when he pulled over to help what he thought was another driver having trouble
with his car. Said other driver was actually a nasty crook who was determined
to rob Logan and rape his wife, and though Logan successfully got away from the
guy, his wife was not so lucky: the crook shot and killed her. It also turns
out that Logan lives out of a trailer parked inside a warehouse (just like Ben
Affleck’s character in The Accountant)
and of course one wall is plastered with photos of Arden, thereby fulfilling
the usual movie criterion for unrequited love. In the climax, Logan puts Arden
through her “ultimate test” — he kidnaps her daughter from school and
challenges Arden to find her on her own without the police helping (you knew the daughter would be kidnapped, didn’t you? If you
didn’t, you flunk Lifetime Clichés 101), though Arden’s sister Gwen (ya remember
Arden’s sister Gwen?) helps track
the girl and ultimately drills Logan at the end, killing him. Fatal
Defense was such a perfect assembly of
Lifetime’s most risible clichés it achieves a sort of demented perfection on
its own, though it’s so mind-numbingly predictable and so ineptly written and
stage the likely reaction it’s going to elicit from anyone is, “Why the hell am
I watching this?”
