by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After A Sister’s Secret
I stayed with Lifetime for a repeat showing of one of their recent “premieres,”
The Wrong Cruise, which judging
from the title and the basic premise I thought was going to be a modern-day
version of the marvelous 1934 film Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, a combination murder mystery and musical set on an
ocean liner with the obvious frisson
that the other characters can’t escape from the killer since they’re all
together on a ship in the mid-Atlantic. Instead it was a depressingly ordinary
thriller set mostly on land — La Paz, Mexico, to be exact — and deals with
middle-aged African-American woman Claire Turner (Vivica A. Fox) and her
daughter Skylar, generally called “Sky” (Sidney Nicole Rogers). Some months
before the film starts, Claire’s husband was killed in an accident, and ever
since then Sky has been acting up in school — in the opening scene we see her
punch out another girl in P.E. because she’d been bullying a third girl, but
since she remains silent on why
she hit the bully, she gets a two-week suspension and the threat of expulsion
if she’s ever caught acting out of line again. Claire has already booked a
three-day cruise down the West Coast to Baja California, Mexico, and she takes
Sky along as planned mainly because she doesn’t want to let her daughter out of
her sight. Unfortunately, some sinister people are on to their identities — we
know that because we’ve seen a scene of otherwise unidentified hands doing a
search on a computer and turning up the Tanners’ identities — and so they go on
the cruise facing danger to which they’re oblivious.
It turns out they’re being
set up by a gang of three crooks, Dante (Andres Londono), his young ward Rico
(the genuinely hot twink Adrian Quinta, who deserves a shot at better roles
than this), and the cruise director Pat (William McNamara), who’s willing to
sell out his passengers for a third of the take. (Actually it was only supposed
to be 20 percent, but midway through the plot Pat holds out for more.) Their
first task is to seduce their pigeons — Dante manages to have sex with Claire
and Rico with Sky — we get the impression that this is the first time Claire
has had sex since her husband died and the first time Sky has had sex at all —
and the next morning Dante offers, while the ship is stopped at La Paz, to take
Claire out for a day trip on his sailboat. Only he pretends that the motor is
broken and strands Claire out in mid-sea, then gives her drugged champagne and
when she comes to reveals that he’s actually kidnapped her for a nefarious
purpose. Meanwhile Rico offers to take Sky to the police, but instead drives
her at night to an out-of-the-way location where he and his confederates are
going to hold her and threaten to kill her if Claire doesn’t pay them the $1
million in life insurance she got from the death of her husband. We also learn
the significance of the scene we saw at the opening — a blonde woman frees
herself from rope bondage — that the Terrible Trio have done this sort of thing
before and at least four women have “disappeared” from earlier cruises on the
same line. It seems that Dante, the ringleader of the three, originally was
just after the money but as he’s done this more often he’s become more openly
sadistic, having fun psychologically torturing their victims and then killing
them, despite Pat’s protests that this will blow the whole thing if his cruise
line becomes notorious for having middle-aged women mysteriously disappear on
every voyage. Rico has a crisis of conscience which better, more sensitive
filmmakers than the ones we got here (director David DeCoteau and writers
Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Nick Everhart, all old Lifetime hands)
might have made into a real dramatic issue instead of an annoying affectation,
and my expectations that Rico would eventually turn state’s evidence against
the gang and give the Mexican police the evidence needed to bust them were
dashed when Dante, realizing Rico can no longer be trusted, off-handedly kills
him just after he’s ambushed and shot both Pat and Pat’s girlfriend, who had
come out to the deserted country cabin (not another deserted country cabin!) to rendezvous with him.
The
filmmakers do one genuinely creative thing with their story: in the last
half-hour Dante off-handedly surprises and kills a Mexican cop and then puts on
his uniform and impersonates him (it’s been established previously that Dante
speaks both English and Spanish perfectly), so for the last half-hour of the
movie Claire and Sky are fleeing through Mexico while they’ve been reported to
the authorities as fugitives from justice who killed a Mexican police officer.
Alas, there’s a continuity glitch as the car Dante has stolen from the real cop
he killed says “Policia Estatil” (State Police) while the jacket he’s wearing,
ostensibly stolen from the real cop Dante killed, reads “Policia Municipal”
(City Police). There’s also a bad mistake in that midway through their flight
Claire and Sky stop at a Gilmore gas station in the interior of Baja and make
off with the station owner’s car — all Mexican gas stations are run by the
state-owned oil company Pemex (Petroleos Mexicanos) and carry the Pemex logo.
Nonetheless, The Wrong Cruise
takes on a Kafka-esque aspect as the heroines are fleeing not only from a
psycho killer impersonating a Mexican cop but from the real Mexican cops — though when they’re finally caught by
genuine police they persuade them ridiculously easily that they’re innocent and
Dante, whom Claire has killed by smashing his head in with a wrench, was the
real bad guy. The Wrong Cruise,
like A Sister’s Secret, is a
pretty ordinary Lifetime movie, and the only interesting visual effect director
DeCoteau and cinematographer Ben Demaree get is some interesting color changes
as Dante is seen in the alternating blinking blue and red lights of the police
car he commandeered. As I said, this would have been a more interesting movie
if it had all taken place (aside from the establishing scenes) on the ocean
liner instead of on land — at the end officials from the U.S. consulate show up
and offer the Tanners a flight back home — and the gimmick of having the bad
guy pose as a cop makes the last half-hour a bit more powerful than it would
have been otherwise, but this is still pretty ordinary to-the-Lifetime-pattern
filmmaking, not offensively bad but nothing special either.
