by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was at least a bit
better than usual: Til Ex Do Us Part, a
pretty typical (for them) story of a female interloper trying to break up a
married couple and establish herself in the wife’s place. It had a few nice
wrinkles that raised it at least a bit above the Lifetime norm. The central couple are Sophia (Kelly
Sullivan) and Kyle (Dan Payne, unusually attractive for a Lifetime husband)
Wrigley, who are both architects and work for the same firm — only she’s a
senior partner and he’s just a junior associate. Though they’ve been together
long enough to have a teenage daughter, Emma (Alisha Newton), the stresses on
their relationship led them to separate. They’re just about to reconcile and
start living together again — helped by the recent sale of the home dad has been
living in while mom lives in another one they own. Only their reunion gets
short-circuited by the sudden appearance of Claire Johnson (Anna Van Hooft),
who claims that during the separation she had an affair with Kyle and ended up
pregnant. Kyle insists to his wife that he and Claire only had sex once (oh, no, I moaned, not one of those “infallible pregnancies
at single contacts” David O. Selznick ridiculed in his production memos on Gone
With the Wind), but the news that this
other woman is about to give their daughter Emma a half-sister or half-brother
leads Sophia to call off the reconciliation and send Kyle packing again. The
film was prefaced by a sequence in which Claire is driving a car on a mountain
road (the film is set in Washington state so, like so many other Lifetime
movies, it could be filmed across the border in British Columbia, Canada) when
her brakes suddenly go out, and then the prologue cuts to a scene in which
Sophia is arrested for attempted murder and cyber-stalking, which is supposed to
leave us in doubt as to which woman is the perpetrator and which is the victim.
Claire reports that she’s not only receiving a spate of insulting texts, at one
point she’s even insulted on Sophie’s property by someone who sneaks up behind
her and clubs her with a rock. But Claire also has discovered the flower pot
under which Sophie hides her keys, she uses them to let herself into Sophie’s
house any time she pleases and, among other things, hack into Sophie’s computer
to upload a photo of herself (Claire) taking a shower at the gym where both she
and Sophie have yoga classes, then post the photo to a Web site that supposedly
offers people the chance to come over and have sex with you then and there. A
would-be fuck buddy duly shows up at Claire’s place while Kyle is there, Kyle
punches him out and the guy reports him, leading Kyle to get himself arrested
for assault and miss an important meeting at the architectural firm (remember
the architectural firm?), so
Sophie has to present the project Kyle designed and gets the assignment to
spearhead the project and work with the clients.
A friend of Sophie’s, Rachel
(Sharon Taylor) — who is white, a departure from the usual Lifetime pattern of
casting African-American actresses as the heroine’s best friend who finds out
the truth about the villainess, only to get knocked off for her pains — traces
Claire and finds out that, while “Johnson” is her legal last name, her first
name is actually Jessica and she started going by “Claire” after she wormed her
way into another family that had
a teenage daughter and as a result both dad and daughter were killed in a car
crash. Rachel calls Jessica/Claire’s mother Doreen (Leanna Brodie) and learns
that Claire can’t possibly be pregnant with Kyle’s child because she’s
incapable of conceiving — she faked
a positive pregnancy test and used some other woman’s ultrasound to fool Kyle
into thinking she was having his baby. But before Rachel can report all this to
Sophie, Claire corners her in the pool of the gym and kills her by holding her
under the water and drowning her. Then Claire puts the crown jewel on her plot
by putting on a blonde wig to disguise herself as Sophie (since Anna Van Hooft
and Alisia Newton both have long dark hair while Sophie’s hair is curly blonde,
Emma looks more like Claire’s daughter than Sophie’s, but that’s a common
enough movie failing we can let that one pass) and getting herself photographed
by a neighborhood surveillance camera as she drains the brake fluid from a car
Kyle was going to give Emma for her 16th birthday (the fact that
these people are complaining about money while they have a Mercedes-Benz
convertible in storage that Kyle wasn’t doing anything with until Claire talked
him into giving it to her as Emma’s birthday present is a bit hard to believe
in itself), then drives off in it and bails out just in time before it crashes
— leading Sophie to get arrested for attempted murder and cyber-stalking (the
text messages against Claire were sent from Sophie’s phone, and the video of
Claire showering from Sophie’s computer, but Claire was a skilled enough hacker
she sent them herself from Sophie’s devices — before her faked accident she
spiked Sophie’s tea with a knockout drug and, while Sophie was unconscious,
applied Sophie’s finger to her phone so she could access it — though even with
her computer skills she physically clipped a photo of herself and pasted it
over Sophie’s instead of using Photoshop to add herself to the picture
digitally, a plot-hole glitch I’ve seen in Lifetime movies before).
Eventually
a nice, milquetoast attorney who seems to have a crush on Sophie (leading me to
think writers Andrea Canning and Lynn Keller were going to have Sophie break up
with Kyle permanently and end up with the lawyer) gets Sophie bailed out, and
the truth comes out. The finale takes place at Sophie’s home, where Claire
shows up with a gun and the two reach for it (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism
attorney thanks you for making him so much money he now has a 300-person law
firm of his own), and Claire ends up shot in the struggle — though she survives
and ends up in a prison mental ward while the Wrigleys get back together and
become a family again. Til Ex Do Us Part (the neologism of the title’s first word still bothers me — it should
either be “Till” or “’Til,” with an apostrophe to indicate it’s a contraction
of “until”) is a bit better than average — the writers give Claire a penchant
for injuring herself that verges on the masochistic, and Anna Van Hooft plays
Claire with a cool precision far more credible than the snarling overacting
some other people playing Lifetime’s bitches have brought to such parts — but
it’s still pretty much to the formula, with Danny J. Boyle (who uses his middle
initial to distinguish himself from the feature-film director of Trainspotting and the Academy Award-winning Slumdog
Millionaire) providing competent but not
particularly imaginative direction. The most interesting performance comes not
from any of the principals but from Sean Kuling, a handsome, moody blond hunk
who plays Nick, a former boyfriend of Claire’s who’s hounding her for money
throughout the movie and who eventually gets dispatched when she shoots him
about an act or two before the end — he’s someone I’d like to see more of, though Dan Payne as Kyle is also hunkier
than the typical “good” Lifetime leading man and acts with more authority than
most actors bring to these roles.
