by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Certainly My Husband’s Secret Wife is a masterpiece by comparison to My
Husband’s Double Life, which achieves a
level of demented silliness rare even for Lifetime. Someone posted a “trivia”
item on imdb.com which read, “Two hours of crap. Don’t waste your time.” While
that sounds more like a review than a trivia item to me (though I believe imdb’s
site guidelines require a review to be longer than that), it’s also pretty
accurate. This time the innocent victim of bigamy is the first wife, Sabrina
Rees (Amy Nuttall), whose husband Fletcher (Daniel Lapaine) is ostensibly a
land developer in New York but takes frequent business trips to Paris, leaving
Sabrina and their teenage daughter Zoë (the marvelously named Chloe Sweetlove)
in the lurch. Neither Fletcher nor Sabrina are exactly drop-dead gorgeous sex
gods, but then Lifetime had to
cast them as middle-aged so it would be believable that they had a teenage
daughter, though they also made a more recent attempt at conception that
resulted in a miscarriage and Sabrina’s ongoing depression. Sabrina is an
accountant who gave up most of her business to raise Zoë but still maintains a
few clients, and she’s sharp enough with a column of figures that she
recognizes something is amiss when she spots among Fletcher’s credit-card
receipts a bill for an item from a fancy lingerie shop in Paris. With that clue
she decides to fly to Paris herself and “surprise” her husband on his latest
“business” trip, only she’s the one who gets surprised. Not only does Fletcher
have another wife, Bridgette Novak (Tamara Aleksic), her father Sergey Novak
(Dragan Micanovic) is a Russian mobster and ostensibly Fletcher’s European
business partner, though it’s obviously Sergey who’s calling the shots. Sergey
threatens Fletcher with the usual dire movie consequences in case he does
anything to dishonor Bridgette — like having another wife and child in New York
— and it also turns out there’s a secret ledger in Fletcher’s office that
records the bribery payments and extortion income of the Novak enterprise.
Sabrina realizes what’s going on when she finds several letters addressed to Fletcher
at the home he shares with Bridgette — thereby giving away that he doesn’t just
stay in hotels when he’s in Paris but actually owns a home there — she goes out
there and meets Bridgette, then hangs out at Fletcher’s office with his
assistant Diane (Katarina Korra), who shares two important characteristics with
Sabrina: a shock of bright red hair and a moral sense that leads her to
cooperate with Sabrina to collect the data that will blow the whistle on
Sergey’s enterprise and get both Sergey and Fletcher arrested.
Only Fletcher
comes back to the office unexpectedly while Diane is grabbing the info Sabrina
needs (for the 21st century it seems odd that she collects the data
on paper instead of scanning it and e-mailing it to Sabrina on her phone) and
Diane, like many another stupid movie character, attempts to flee by going up. Fletcher catches her on the roof and, seeing her
only from the back and noticing only the red hair, pushes her off the roof
thinking she’s Sabrina — so he’s shocked later on to find Sabrina still alive.
Meanwhile Fletcher has asked his and Sabrina’s daughter Zoë to fly out to Paris
and join him — apparently his intent is, now that he thinks he’s knocked off
her mom, to settle her in the house he’s sharing with Bridgette and their son
Nathan (whom we never see but we hear a lot of because he’s a baby and he’s
crying a lot) — and the climax occurs at Bridgette’s home, where Fletcher gets
pushed to his death into an empty swimming pool Fletcher was having dug there
so Zoë could use it when she relocated there. Sergey survives scot-free and is
not unhappy to see Fletcher dead (though it seems hard to believe that a fall
of just a few feet could be fatal — but then there are a lot of things in this movie that seem hard to believe). My
Husband’s Double Life has one truly great
suspense sequence — the one in which Fletcher kills Diane while Sabrina
watches, horrified but unable to do anything to stop it without giving herself
away and getting killed, too — expertly staged by director Jonathan English
(the writer of this nonsense is Jenny Paul, and the script is so mind-boggling
incoherent I was starting to wonder what drugs she was on), but the rest of the
story is just stupid, though it achieves a certain camp entertainment value as
a sort of ur-Lifetime movie, the
one in which all of Lifetime’s most absurd clichés went to die.
