by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. I watched another
Lifetime movie — Tempted by Danger, one they’d been giving a really intense hype to but which really
turned out to be the traditional Lifetime formula, just with Black people. The
star is Gabrielle Graham, playing Nicole Brooks, a rising young attorney at a
law firm who’s about to make partner because of her skill at pressuring
swindlers to give up at least part of their ill-gotten gains to avoid serious
criminal prosecution. She works closely with a white attorney at the firm, Kyle
Miller (Dan Mousseau, not drop-dead gorgeous but nice and easy on the eyes) —
so closely that she describes him as her “work husband” even though there isn’t
even the hint of anything sexual between
them. They do spend a lot of late
evenings together, but only to go over the firm’s pending cases, and in any
cases he’s already got a non-work marriage to a white woman and it appears to be happy. Only
Nicole’s sister, Angela Brooks Beaty (Keshia Knight Pulliam, who’s shorter and
a lot more heavy-set than
Gabrielle Graham), is determined to find Nicole a boyfriend. Angela already has
a (Black) husband, has had two kids with him and is expecting a third, and
she’s convinced all work and no play is making Nicole a dull girl indeed.
Angela works at an advertising agency and one day she meets a man named Michael
Langdon (Michael Xavier) who’s just hired on there as a creative advisor.
Angela immediately thinks of Michael as a suitable match for Nicole — He’s
young, Black, sexy and seemingly intelligent and professional. Michael’s first
attempt to take Nicole out to a super-exclusive restaurant called The Beast (do
they serve the famous “roast beast” from How the Grinch Stole Christmas?) runs afoul of her work schedule — her law firm
is angling for a new client, a company whose managers are impressed by the
dedication and purposefulness with which she prepared for her firm’s
presentation one of them offers her a job.
Thanks to the authorial fiat of
writer Laura Balson Carter, the first time Nicole and Michael do go out together it’s to a shooting range, where
it’s established that Nicole is a great shot and Michael a mediocre one who can
barely hit the target (one wonders if Carter had seen the first, 1934, version
of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which the wife of the kidnapped child — Edna
Best, Mrs. Herbert Marshall, in the role Doris Day played in the remake — was
established in the opening sequence as a crack shot so it would be believable
that at the end of the movie she’s able to take a sniper-style shot and kill
the villain who’s holding her child hostage without hurting the child) — though
eventually they spend an entire weekend together and we get the distinct
impression they spent most of that time in bed with Michael giving Nicole by
far the greatest sex she’s ever had in her life. (It’s entirely possible that
we’re supposed to “read” Nicole’s character as previously a virgin until her
hot weekend with Michael — just as we were supposed to “read” the central
character in 2001’s Passion and Prejudice, a prim white college professor who finds the Black ex-con who’s just
hired on as her gardener, lubriciously irresistible even though she had previously never had sex.) Gabrielle Graham
isn’t much of an actress to suggest either the work-driven or the lust-driven
aspects of her character, though that doesn’t much matter since we’re shown her
in surprisingly scanty clothing (especially for a lawyer!) so straight Black
guys (or straight white guys with a “thing” for Black women) can find both her
and this movie appealing. Anyway, as the film progresses Michael gets more and
more possessive, determined to eliminate anyone else Nicole is at all involved with and also
consumed with jealousy that her relationship with Josh may extend beyond the
office and the long weekends they spend together doing homework. Writer Carter
and director Annie Bradley (who gets some nicely atmospheric shots and
suspenseful scenes; in general, she does the best she can with what she was
given, which wasn’t much) make it clear to us that Josh has zero interest in Nicole “that way”
(he’s not-bad looking but he’s more of a teddy bear than a stud, and so in the
Lifetime iconography that the best-looking and sexiest man in one of their movies
is almost invariably the villain we can trust him and it’s Michael both Nicole and the audience should be worrying
about).
Michael’s plot, whatever it is, starts to unravel when Nicole starts
getting creeped out at how much he knows about the rest of her life — though,
alas, her suspicions (as opposed to other parts of her) don’t start getting
aroused until after she’s already given Michael the key to her home (and one of
the things that starts getting her suspicious of him is he never invites her to
his place — it turns out
because he’s merely renting a garage and that would totally blow his
Black-professional image). We start getting even more suspicious about Michael
when he turns in his BMW to a local garage run by a skuzzy white guy and
obtains a loaner car —especially when he flips through multiple driver’s
licenses before handing the garage owner the one with “Willie” as his name (we
don’t see it but we hear the garage owner call him “Willie”) — which he uses to
run down Josh outside the law firm’s offices after spraying the security camera
with paint so it won’t record what he’s doing. It seemed as if Carter was
setting up Josh to be the best friend who discovers the villain’s plot but gets
killed for his pain — it would have been a nice reversal of Lifetime’s usual
formulae to have a Black “pussy in peril” have a white friend who discovers the villain’s plot but gets
killed for his or her pains. But Josh is merely hospitalized, not killed, and
since he and Nicole were supposed to start a big trial the following Monday and
he’s not going to recover in time — nor is the judge going to be willing to
delay it until Josh is ready to work again — Nicole gets the assignment to lead
the trial team. Only first she has to spend one last weekend at work preparing
the opening brief, which contains confidential information obtained from the
other side via discovery, and of course — and in total violation of every basic rule of how real offices work in 2020 (or at least used to until
the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic closed almost all of them!), nobody bothers to back the
whole thing up. There are bits and pieces of it on Josh’s computer but the
confidential files can’t be re-created, and according to the rules of court if
the brief disappears before trial the other side has to be tipped off that
their confidential information has been compromised and the result could be
either a directed verdict for the other side or a mistrial.
So Michael, upset
that Nicole has finally seen through his act and broken up with him — aided when
Angela learns, and tells her sister, that Michael never actually worked for the
ad agency: he just showed up one morning and pretended to work there to get a contact with someone close
to Nicole, whom he’d seen from afar at a Bar Association event and immediately
decided was The Woman for him, even though, using the
name Todd Langdon, he’d pulled this
stunt once before and the woman he targeted then had to get a restraining order
against him — of course he steals the all-important brief. (Memo to Lauren Balson
Carter: how did Michael know the brief was so damned important?) The loss of the brief leads the
middle-aged guy who owns the law firm (and whom we’ve never seen before) to
fire Nicole at once, which suits Michael just fine because he figures that if Nicole
is unemployed she’ll be willing to flee the country with him on however much
money he’s able to accumulate for them to live on. To make that happen, he
kidnaps Angela (ya remember Angela?) and threatens to kill her if Nicole doesn’t run off with him, and when Nicole goes after them
she discovers that Michael has also stolen her gun, but in the final
confrontation in Michael’s garage she manages to get the gun away from him and,
when he threatens to kill Angela, she drills him with a perfect shot (ya remember
that she’s a crack shot?) that
blows him away. Six months later Nicole has a new job with the former client
who wanted to hire her away from her law firm in the first place — Josh is
discontented that they won’t be able to work together any longer but he’s happy
Nicole has landed on her feet — and she seems to be on track to an O.K. life
again even though I was hoping writer Carter would come up with a new and sane
romantic interest for her. In fact I had a specific person in mind I wanted
Carter to pair her off with: Rod (Manuel Rodriguez-Saenz), the dreadlocked
neighbor of Nicole’s whom she’s had a good and easy-going friendship but it
would have been nice if it would
have developed into something more.
Tempted by Danger — I guess all the good Lifetime titles were taken — is an O.K. movie with
a few nice touches, like the way not only Michael’s demeanor but even his
physical appearance changes when he’s revealed as the villain: by the end of
the movie he’s doffed the three-piece suits he wore in ad-man guise (it turns
out he never really worked at the agency: he just pretended to work there to get close to Angela so he could
in turn get close to her sister Nicole) and is dressing like a gangbanger,
complete with ball cap and dark casual clothes. But it’s mostly just the
modern-day “race movie” version of the usual Lifetime clichés, and without any
of the surprising artistry with which writer Tracy McMillan transformed Jane
Austen’s classic 19th century British novel Pride and Prejudice into Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta, a story among Atlanta’s Black 1-percenters (and
the idea that Atlanta or any other major U.S. city has Black 1-percenters —enough of them to form a
definable community — was no doubt itself a surprise for a lot of viewers).
There’s a worse-than-average performance from Gabrielle Graham as Nicole and a
better-than-average one from Michael Xavier as the psycho (though I’ve seen
better versions of the cute, sexy psycho before — including the granddaddy of
them all, Anthony Perkins’ performance as the disarming Norman Bates in 1960’s Psycho), but for the most part Tempted by Danger is just another Lifetime movie, distinguished only
by giving African-American actors equal access to these stultifying
white-people’s clichés
