Revenge Delivered (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lifetime showed another “premiere” movie on Saturday, May 1 with the almost risible title Revenge Delivered. The title might have seemed to indicate a delivery driver who was really a psychopath out to get revenge on various customers along his or her route for whatever grievances, real or imagined, Lifetime’s writer de jour could come up with for them – had Christine Conradt written a script on that theme she’d probably have called it The Perfect Amazon Driver, but the agenda this film’s actual writer, Jason Robinson, had was quite different. The film opens with a prologue set in 1995 in which a 20-something Black woman obstetrician/gynecologist, Dr. Victoria Brooks (Olunike Adeliyi), is faced with a crisis involving a young white woman’s troubled birth. With the baby’s shoulders too big to fit through the birth canal, Dr. Brooks wants to abandon natural childbirth and do a C-section instead – but she lets it go too late and she’s faced with the dilemma of which person to save: the mother or the baby. Mom says through her pain that she’d rather her child be born even if that means her own death, and so mom dies and the baby lives – and then we get a closeup of the baby’s father, who is not surprisingly angry that his wife died and now he’s going to be stuck raising his daughter as a single father.

The film then flashes forward to 2020, and Dr. Victoria Brooks is so well regarded St. John’s, the hospital where she works, is giving her an award for excellence – but she’s still haunted by the mother she had to let die 25 years earlier. The memories come flooding back when she arranges to mentor three young women who want to go into ob/gyn themselves – especially since one of them is Brooks’ own daughter Noelle (Mary Antonini). Victoria is ultra-critical of her daughter and watches her every move both in the hospital and at home – she’s graduated from medical school but her mom still insists that she live with Victoria and her husband (Noelle’s father – Robinson throws us a line to make sure we get that he’s in fact her biological father, not a stepfather) Thomas (Jefferson Brown), a white guy who restores 1950’s British sports cars and pursues that as a hobby while his wife is the breadwinner. (Kudos to the film’s casting director for finding an actress to play Noelle who looks credible as the offspring of a white father and a Black mother.) Then various untoward things start happening around the hospital and Victoria’s practice there. First someone sets her computer printer to spew out page after page on which the words are repeated, “Remember what happened on … ,” whatever the date was when Victoria had to let the mother die to save her child. Then someone throws a rock through the window of her car, and wrapped around the rock is a message, “Next time I’ll throw something bigger than a rock.”

Victoria quickly realizes that there are only three people close enough to her to be doing these things, the people she’s supposed to be training: her daughter Noelle; Claire Matthews (Samantha Brown), a white woman with long blonde hair who reaches out to Noelle and offers her support against her overbearing mother; and Luna Alvarez (Tamara Almeida), who’s carefully built up by writer Robinson as a red herring because she has a flame tattoo similar to that of the father (though it’s on her back instead of her arm). But any hardened Lifetime movie-watcher can almost instantly guess it’s Claire who’s Dr. Brooks’ torturer, and as her crimes escalate she goes all-out to disgrace Dr. Brooks and force her out of her job. The culmination of her scheme comes when she sneaks morphine into the IV of a woman about to give birth in Dr. Brooks’ operation, while at the same time stealing all the drugs that would ordinarily be used to counteract it. Dr. Brooks manages to get hold of naloxone and bring the woman back from the brink, so both she and her newborn baby enter the world alive and reasonably healthy – but she is brought up on charges by the hospital administration and the head of the hospital tells Dr. Brooks he’s going to suspend her medical license at least “temporarily” until the hospital completes its investigation. (I’m sure this is a mistake in the script; an individual hospital administrator can suspend a particular doctor’s privilege to practice at that hospital but he couldn’t suspend her license altogether. All he could do if he wanted that to happen is to recommend it to the state medical board, which would have final say over whether she could keep her license.) By the time Victoria realizes that Claire is her tormentor, it’s nearly too late: Noelle has gone off for a weekend camping in the mountains with Claire, only Claire knocks Noelle out and ties her up, then when mom shows up binds and gags her and finally explains her plan both to the Brookses and to us.

It seems that Claire’s dad never stopped tormenting her, blaming her for the death of her mother and constantly harassing her and doing everything he could to make her life totally miserable and give her guilt feelings about being alive when her mom was dead. Robinson’s writing and William Corcoran’s direction, which until this final scene have been nothing special, suddenly acquire weight and power as Claire pours out her history, culminating in her murdering her father after his psychological and physical abuse got to be too much – she stabbed her dad with a kitchen knife and then somehow was able to fake the scene so it looked like he died in a car crash (and since he had a history of alcoholism and DUI the cops are all too ready to believe that), then she went to medical school determined to become and ob/gyn and train with Victoria just to destroy her. Eventually Victoria’s husband (who was delayed because before she left Claire slashed all four tires of his car) figures out where they are (it helps that Victoria had kept a GPS tracker on her daughter’s cell phone and is thus able to find out where she is) and leads the police, led by detective Andy Garcia (Antonio Sobretodo, Jr. – though despite the Hispanic names of both character and actor he frankly looked more Asian to me), to the scene, where they rescue Victoria and Noelle and, thanks to Noelle being able to wriggle free from her bonds and club Claire with a large stick, knocking her out long enough – the police arrest Claire and take her into custody instead of either them or one of the Brookses killing her. Aside from its quirky title, Revenge Delivered has little to recommend it other than a powerful reading of Claire’s final speech by Samantha Brown (indeed, her whole performance is quite effective, portraying her deliberation as well as her madness and avoiding the annoying perkiness a lot of Lifetime villainesses have manifested in their attempts to seem “normal”); otherwise it’s a fairly typical Lifetime movie, albeit with two Black protagonists and, once again, an interracial marriage and the mixed-race person it’s produced treated on screen as if they’re no big deal.