A Date with Danger (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was a film called A Date with Danger, which was mostly pretty normal Lifetime fare although it had a few deviations from their usual formulae. The central character is Nikki Hansen (Lara Jean Chorostecki), who moves to a small town from the big city (neither of these locations are specified more than that) with her teenage daughter Brooke (Jaida Grace) in tow. Brooke’s dad periodically abandons the family and then suddenly returns, sort of like Yancey Cravat in Edna Ferber’s Cimarron and the films adapted from it, only Nikki has finally given up on any chance of holding him down and making it work between them as a couple. Instead she’s decided to relocate and she’s secured a home in what’s pretty obviously an abandoned and converted church building. While on the street with her daughter she’s accosted by Gavin (Jamie Spikchuk), owner of Note of Grace Coffee, who gives her a coupon for a free cup of coffee but is obviously interested in more from her than that. Later on, when Brooke demands that her mom take her shopping for a new wardrobe even though mom says she can’t afford it, Nikki and Brooke stumble on the local boutique, Not Your Mom’s Closet, and its proprietress, Liz Cole (Ipsita Paul). The moment we see that Liz is African-American we hardened Lifetime watchers immediately assume she’s being set up for the usual fate of an African-American woman on this channel: to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine. Actually Liz has a different role to play in the story: she’s more like Nikki’s fairy godmother, offering her a job in the store and mentoring her as much as possible about romantic possibilities in the town.

Alas, Liz is in the middle of an excruciatingly bitter divorce with Dan Miller (Matt Wells), a relationship that went far enough back that their daughter Anna (Kayla Hutton) is Brooke’s age and Nikki tries to get the two of them to bond because Brooke, ripped out of her school and away from all her friends by her mom’s sudden decision to move, needs all the friends (and all the help in school; she laments, “Half the kids are ahead of me and the other half are behind me”) she can get. If I were in this movie I’d probably be warning Liz to date Black men for a change – except that there don’t seem to be any – since the two guys we know she’s been involved with are both white and were both disasters. After she divorced Dan she started a brief affair with Gavin, only he was too possessive and controlling – among other things, he wanted her to close her shop and move in with him almost immediately – and having already been through one relationship with a possessive, controlling man who wanted to run her life and didn’t want her to have a career outside the marriage, she wasn’t going to tolerate another. Liz tries to warn Nikki away from getting involved with Gavin, only like a typical Lifetime heroine Nikki doesn’t take her friend’s advice. Soon Gavin is showering her with expensive gifts, including a guitar (Brooke had a chance to take guitar lessons in school if she could come up with an instrument, Nikki said they couldn’t afford it and she should try choir instead, but Gavin said he had an old guitar gathering dust and Brooke could have it) to a pendant previously worn by Gavin’s wife (he said their child was stillborn and his wife never recovered from the trauma and eventually killed herself, but we’re thinking, “Yeah, right … ”) and even tickets for a vacation to Ireland. (Gavin has noticed a Celtic cross on Nikki’s keychain and figured the Emerald Isle is her ancestral homeland, and when she says, “Yeah, I’d like to go there some day … ” Gavin decided to make it happen).

One of the most annoying things about A Date with Danger is the mystery of where both Gavin and Liz get their money; they’re supposed to be local independent businesspeople in a small town but they seem to have bottomless financial resources. Liz has enough money to hire Nikki off the bat, and enough assets that when she disappears midway through the story her fortune becomes a principal part of the story as Liz turns out to have changed her will to leave virtually all of it to Nikki. As for Gavin, he’s running a coffeehouse out of a converted barn (just about every building in this town seems to have been converted from something else) but he’s still got enough money for tickets to Ireland and lots of other goodies with which he hopes to woo Nikki. Writer John Burd and director Cat Hostick (odd to see a Lifetime movie written by a man and directed by a woman; usually it’s the other way around!) keep the melodrama percolating for about an hour or so – this is unusually slow-moving for Lifetime – until we get to the scene that was used as one of Lifetime’s typical prologues, in which we see a bit of action whose significance will only be apparent later. Nikki has broken off with Gavin because she thinks he’s moving too fast for her and sees “red flags” in his behavior that are warning her off the relationship. Gavin goes ballistic and recognizes the phrase “red flags” as one Liz used about him, too, so he responds by breaking into her clothes shop, kidnapping her and holding her hostage in the basement of his coffeehouse. The cops suspect Nikki of being behind Liz’s disappearance because Liz just changed her will to leave that mysterious fortune of hers to Nikki in case anything happens to her. Nikki herself suspects Liz’s ex-husband Dan and thinks he either killed or kidnapped her as part of the fallout from their divorce case and to win full custody of his daughter Anna. Nikki has Anna assigned to her temporary custody and Dan shows up, trying to take her – and Anna, in just about the one degree of moral complexity in this movie, wants to go with him because, however much of an asshole Liz said he was, he is still her father.

Later, when Nikki figures out where Liz is, Dan follows her there – and ends up kidnapped himself. Gavin hits on the idea of killing both Liz and Dan and making it look like a murder-suicide, only eventually – after some confusing action in and around that basement – Nikki frees Liz and the two women overpower Dan. They’re rescued by the police, led by Detective Banks (Raven Dauda), yet another African-American authority figure in a Lifetime movie, and somewhat to our surprise Gavin is actually arrested and taken into custody by the police. Usually Lifetime villains are either killed or escape and get tag scenes suggesting they’re going to pull the same scheme somewhere else. A Date with Danger offers the women characters a bit more agency than most Lifetime films, but it’s still pretty much what Maureen Dowd called “pussies in peril” and it doesn’t help that, though Jamie Spikchuk is rugged and easy on the eyes, he’s not the drop-dead gorgeous hunk of masculinity Lifetime usually casts as its male villains. I joked to my husband Charles, who had to suffer through this with me, “A date with danger? Is there an app for that?” He joked right back, “Sure there is. It’s called Grindr” – the on-line hook-up service for Gay men that was recently purchased by a Chinese company, which creates the scary possibility that a relentlessly homophobic government like China’s might have a listing of thousands of American Gay men, ready for whatever concentration camps or Gulags the Chinese might send them to if and when China, with their growing political, economic and military clout, takes over the West and/or calls the loans they’ve been making to prop up the U.S. government (at least 25 percent of America’s national debt is held by the Chinese).