Driven to Kill (Johnson Production Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime ran a couple of movies that were at least different enough that they didn’t weaken each other the way the two they’d shown on Saturday, Imperfect High and The Price of Fitting In. The first one was pretty predictable Lifetime stuff: it was shown under the title Driven to Kill but imdb.com lists it as the slightly more enigmatic Wheels of Beauty. Actually it could have easily been called Psycho NASCAR Driver, since the protagonists are retired stock-car racer Andrew James (Philip Boyd, O.K.-looking but considerably less sexy than some other Lifetime villains) and Brittany Green (Shelby Yardley), a young blonde woman who all her life has yearned to drive fast cars (we get a flashback sequence of her as a small kid speeding around in a pedal-driven toy car pretending to be a racer). She shows up at the Inglewood Speedway to take classes in stock-car racing from Andrew, who was forced to retire from racing because of a blood clot in his brain (writers Doug Campbell, who also directed, and David Chester carefully indicate that his injury was not from a racing crash). But she also works as a hospitality clerk at a bed-and-breakfast inn run by Rhonda Matthews (Angela Nicholas), a middle-aged white woman with short grey hair and a formidable manner. Brittany is about to become engaged to Rhonda’s son Kevin (Devante Winfrey), who presents as Black – there’s a brief insert of a photo of Rhonda with Kevin’s Black dad, indicating that he’s only half-Black – which confused the friend I was watching this with.

Rhonda is grooming Kevin and Brittany to take over the bed-and-breakfast when she retires – she wants a firm commitment from them to make that the focus of the rest of their lives – but Brittany isn’t sure she wants to spend her life catering to the whims of other people behind a hotel desk. She wants a career in stock-car racing, and Andrew is happy to coach her but also decides from the moment he lays eyes on her that she’s the woman of his dreams. First he sabotages the car of Kevin’s ex and leaves it parked in Kevin’s driveway, hoping that Brittany will think Kevin is cheating on her with his ex and she’ll break up with him (which she does for a couple of acts before they reconcile). Next, he murders an Italian driver, a veteran of the Grand Prix circuit (which actually is a different skill set from NASCAR), after Brittany expresses interest in training with him. Then he runs down Rhonda on the street and paints a red gang insignia to make it look like a youth gang ran her down to rob and kill her. Campbell and Chester make it clear that Andrew’s interest in Brittany is not only sexual; he’s also training her so she can become a success and he can re-experience his career vicariousliy through her now that he can’t drive competitively anymore (sort of like Clint Eastwood as the retired fighter training Hillary Swank to live out his dreams in Million Dollar Baby).

But when Brittany definitively decides she’s going to remain with Kevin and her interests in Andrew, such as they are, don’t include having sex with him, he takes his revenge by clubbing Kevin with a wrench and then tying him up, forcing him to drink drug-laced water (the drugs were prescribed to Andrew for his seizures) and ultimately tying him up and throwing him in the trunk of his racing car, which he has wired with a bomb that will go off when the car hits 200 miles per hour in the practice run An drew has set up for Brittany, ostensibly to qualify her to drive in a professional race but really to kill both her and her inconvenient boyfriend. There are several mistakes here I’ve already posted to imdb.com: first, racing cars don’t have speedometers (speedometers work by running a wire between the speedometer and one of the car’s wheels, and that might slow the car down ever so slightly in a sport in which seconds literally matter). Racing drivers tell how fast they’re going by using tachometers, which measure how fast the engine is turning in revolutions per minute (RPM’s) – though it’s conceivable you could equip a racing car with an airspeed indicator, which is how people who fly planes keep track of how fast they’re going: the gauge measures how fast air is rushing past it and that gives you your speed. Second, on a racing car all the doors, including the trunk, are welded shut; Campbell and Chester got it right about the doors – when Brittany enters the race car, she climbs through the window opening (which is correct) – but they have Andrew hide Kevin’s body in the trunk, which he couldn’t do in a real racing car since the trunk would be welded shut, too.

In any case, Campbell does deliver a nice, if predictable, suspense sequence as the speedometer on Brittany’s car approaches 200 miles per hour and Kevin, with the effect of the drugs wearing off, tries to alert Brittany of his predicament by kicking the back wall between the car’s cockpit and the trunk. Brittany hears that and attributes it to a mechanical flaw in the car; over the intercom she and Andrew have set up so he can coach her during her run, she tells him she wants to bring the car in and check it out. He insists that she has to reach 200 miles per hour in her practice run or her chances for a career in racing will be over. Of course she reaches 199 miles per hour and then stops the car. Kevin, who knows about the bomb in the car because Andrew told him about it, gets freed and calls the police, and as the siren indicates that they’re coming Andrew gets into the car himself, apparently trying to kill Brittany, Kevin and himself by reaching the fatal 200 miles per hour and blowing up the car in their vicinity – only they get out of the way just in time and Andrew conveniently takes himself out without collateral damage. Driven to Kill is an O.K. Lifetime movie whose only real novelty is that in being about stock-car racing it has more action than most films in this formula – otherwise it’s a standard Lifetime obsessed-psycho movie. One unusual thing about Driven to Kill is that the actors playing good guys are better than the one playing the bad guy: Shelby Yardley and Devante Winfrey have real charisma and genuine chemistry as an on-screen couple, while all Philip Boyd can do is stand around and look morose. (A hotter, sexier actor as the villain might have helped a lot.) I also felt sorry for Brittany having to spend the rest of her life doing something as boring as running a bed-and-breakfast even though she’s got a hot guy to do it with. Couldn’t she at least keep driving and race on her days off in semi-professional contests?