The Perfect Wedding (MB Thrilling Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

My husband Charles and I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” The Perfect Wedding, at 8 p.m. I was somewhat surprised that, unlike most of the “Perfect … ” movies (in which the heroine thinks she’s found the “perfect” nanny/husband/teacher/nurse/whatever and finds that “perfect” means “psycho”), this was not written by Christine Conradt. Instead it was written by Andrea Canning and Elizabeth Stuart (Canning is a familiar name to me from other Lifetime films, though Stuart isn’t) and directed by Roxanne Boisvert. The story deals with Brandon Holt (Eric Hicks) and Lindsay Williams (Tenika Davis), who are already living together but are planning a wedding ceremony in a week. Brandon is a white man and Lindsay is a Black woman, and once again it’s nice to watch a Lifetime movie in which an interracial relationship is presented as no big deal – even though Hicks and Davis have about zero chemistry together and, unlike some of the other interracial couplings we’ve seen in recent Lifetime movies, it’s hard to accept them as being able to make a long-term commitment work. At least part of that may be due to the structure of the Canning-Stuart script, which through most of the movie depicts Brandon and Lindsay on the “outs” after the events of their respective bachelor parties. Brandon’s is no big deal – just him and his work buddies sitting around a card table playing poker – but Lindsay’s is: she goes to the bar of the hotel where all of them seem to be staying prior to the wedding with two friends, Catherine Tucker (Lydia Zadel) and Dina Metras (Julia Borsalino). (The imdb.com page on this movie lists her name as “Dana” but “Dina” is what I heard on the soundtrack.)

Dina is Lindsay’s true friend, but Catherine – unbeknownst to Lindsay – is out to break her and Brandon up so she can have Brandon, whom she works for as his assistant at the Standforth advertising agency, for herself. So she hires an escort named Jake Powell (Nicolas James Wilson, not surprisingly the sexiest guy in the movie) to crash the bachelor party, offer Lindsay a drink that he’s actually spiked with a drug, then take Lindsay to a room in the hotel and leave her there, with her clothes strewn about the floor and an empty condom wrapper on top of the dresser, to make it look like Lindsay and Jake had sex. Canning and Stuart are not going for suspense here; we learn almost immediately that Catherine masterminded this whole thing to break up Brandon and Lindsay, and we see her paying off Jake and telling him, “Lose my number.” The incident has the effect Catherine wanted – Brandon has a jealous hissy-fit and tells Lindsay the wedding is off and he never wants to see her again, which since they were already living together is a bit of a problem. Faithful Dina offers to put Lindsay up in the home of Dina’s parents, which she’s house-sitting for them while they’re spending the summer in Europe, and the two are determined to find out who the guy was that set her up and who arranged for him to do so. Only their amateur sleuthing efforts hit a snag when Jake contacts Catherine and tries to blackmail her for more money or he’ll report her to the police, and Catherine responds by getting in her car and running Jake over, killing him. Lindsay and Dina have already obtained Jake’s photo from hotel security but they had no idea who he was until they caught the TV news coverage of the supposed hit-and-run “accident” that killed him. They contact the escort service he worked for but find he wasn’t working a gig for them that Saturday night.

Meanwhile, Catherine’s scheme to get Brandon by eliminating the competition hits a snag in the person of Brandon’s mother Nancy (Barbara Gordon), who never thought Lindsay was good enough for him and wants to fix him up with her yoga teacher, an old family friend named Brooke Weston (Erica Anderson). Brandon insists that the wounds from his breakup with Lindsay are too fresh for him even to think about dating again, but mom tricks them by inviting them to dinner at the hotel restaurant, then claiming she has to go to a nonexistent “book club” so Brandon and Brooke can be alone. It’s not clear where this relationship might otherwise go, but as it turns out it goes nowhere because Catherine worms the secret out of Brooke by taking her yoga class and gossiping with her. She also overhears that Brooke, even though she makes her living off physical fitness, has a “heart condition” that makes it dangerous for her to jog. So Catherine is able to eliminate Brooke by overpowering her in her office at the yoga studio and giving her an injection of potassium chloride (the drug they use in lethal-injection executions, by the way) – most Lifetime movies that depict murder by injection at least establish that the person giving the injection had been a nurse or had had some medical training, but this time the writers couldn’t be bothered. Meanwhile Lindsay and Dina turn up William “Billy” Simpson (Drew Moss, who’s supposed to be your typical Lifetime loser schlub but whom I found quite sexy in a bear-ish way), Jake Powell’s former roommate, who’s living in a house owned by Catherine and turns out to be her half-brother. Catherine shows up at Billy’s place just after Lindsay and Dina do, and warns him not to tell her secrets or else – which I presumed was Andrea Canning and Elizabeth Stuart signing his death warrant, but in fact he’s alive and well at the end and Lindsay and Dina are able to get him to come with them and report his evidence to the police. It turns out that he and Catherine are half-siblings (same mom, different dads) and that Catherine had previously obsessed about a man she was working for who died a week after they broke up. The official verdict was he’d been killed by a mugger, but it was really Catherine beating him to death in a jealous hissy-fit after he told her he was leaving her.

Lindsay and Dina rush to contact Brandon before he leaves on a business trip to New York with Catherine in tow, saying she’s dangerous and under no circumstances should he make the trip with her, especially because New York is where she killed her last boyfriend. (The story is set in Philadelphia; Lifetime often isn’t specific about where their plots take place, but this time they were – though for some reason Brandon and Catherine are depicted as planning to fly to New York for their “business meeting.”) The ending is oddly anticlimactic for a Lifetime movie – no one produces a gun, no one has a struggle to the death and Dina is not marked for death as the Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine (usually the heroine is white and the best friend is Black, but this time Canning and Stuart seemed to be reversing the usual races of these characters). Instead Catherine is simply arrested for Brooke’s murder – the cops, smarter than usual in crime fiction, figured out that Brooke was murdered after her body was autopsied and the track mark from Catherine’s hypodermic was discovered – though they seem uninterested in charghing her with killing Jake as well, maybe because the evidence wasn’t as strong or maybe because Jake was merely an escort and thereby marked in police jargon as “NHI” (“no humans involved”). There isn’t even a tag scene showing Catherine in jail, either obsessing about Brandon (still) or making a play for another male authority figure, a prison official or a guard. Instead the final scene shows the “Perfect Wedding” going off as scheduled, albeit a week late (during which time Brandon’s mom had been bitching about having to eat the non-refundable deposits she’d paid to the caterers, photographers and other suppliers), after Brandon begs Lindsay’s forgiveness for doubting her. I still don’t find much chemistry between Eric Hicks and Tenika Davis, and I was also disappointed that we didn’t get a soft-core porn scene between them (I get off on the color contrast between the two bodies in interracial sex scenes and was upset I didn’t get my kinky thrill from this one), but The Perfect Wedding is a workmanlike Lifetime thriller with an acceptable instead of truly inspired performance by Lydia Zadek as the “bad girl.”