Wrath: A "Seven Deadly Sins" Story (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched two Lifetime movies back-to-back starting at 8: Wrath: A “Seven Deadly Sins” Story and The Wrong High School Sweetheart. Wrath was one of those annoying cases in which Lifetime hadn’t briefed the imdb.com Web site anything about this movie, including the names of the director, the writer and the principal cast members, but I was able to get information from other sources online – notably an interview with the film’s star, Michelle Williams, in the New York Post (https://nypost.com/2022/04/16/michelle-williams-on-sex-sins-and-the-wrath-of-tina-knowles/) on April 16. First, one thing the interview put me right about was that this was not the white Michelle Williams who co-starred with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain and became his off-screen partner and the mother of his daughter Matilda. No, this was the Black Michelle Williams who was Beyoncé’s partner in Destiny’s Child, the singing group that made her a star and launched her career. (The third member of the vocal trio was Kelly Rowland, and back then Beyoncé was still using her full name, Beyoncé Knowles.)

Wrath was one of a series of “inspirational” novels by Victoria Christopher Murray, a Black author whose books draw on religion in general and the Bible in particular, and she announced some years ago that she was working on a series which would cover each of the seven deadly sins, though so far the only ones she’s written are Lust, Envy, Wrath and Greed. The first two were filmed by Lifetime last year and Wrath and Greed were the follow-ups, though neither Lifetime’s nor Murray’s Web sites offers evidence that she’s done stories about the other three sins. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica Web site (https://www.britannica.com/topic/seven-deadly-sins), the other three sins are pride, gluttony and sloth, and though one can readily imagine suite a nice book about pride, sloth would be a good deal less interesting and gluttony would be almost impossible (though the above-cited source say that “gluttony” includes drunkenness as well, and that has inspired plenty of interesting stories, including The Lost Weekend.)

Murray considers it part of her mission to propagandize for God in general and Christianity in particular, but there’s a good deal less open religiosity in Wrath than there was in Lust or Envy (at least according to the way Lifetime’s writers and directors have dramatized them). Basically it’s yet another Lifetime tale about the boyfriend turned stalker from hell: the heroine is Chastity Jeffries (Michelle Williams), aspiring attorney who’s just made junior partner in her law firm and is the daughter of legendary civil-rights attorney Victor Jeffries. (The online documentation does not mention the name of the actor playing the father, but he’s damned good, bringing real power and authority to what would in lesser hands have been a clichéd nothing role.) She meets a white attorney named Xavier Collins (Antonio Cupo) and starts a flaming affair with him including him fucking her on their first date – she tells us she doesn’t usually trick out with men she’s just met, but was willing to make an exception because they were both attorneys, they both had the same birth date and they start a relationship that is “serlous” enough she’s thinking of introducing him to her parents, Victor and Sarah (Tina Knowles, Beyoncé’s real-life mother and a longtime family friend: Michelle Williams apparently texted Beyoncé saying, “Your mom is killing it!”).

Only things start going wrong when they have an argument that ends with Xavier literally pushing Chastity off the sidewalk and onto the street, where a car nearly runs her down (the sequence looked oddly like one of those commercials advertising the new cars that are equipped to stop automatically just in time to avoid an accident). Xavier tells Chastity that he survived child abuse at the hands of his grandmother, who raised him after his mom died. Then Xavier’s career takes a quick plummet when the management of the law firm he works for fires him from a major case for making a stupid mistake involving e-mail (writers Robert Blaney and Gregory Small aren’t too specific about what he did that was so terrible – possibly revealing confidential information, which was my guess – but he pleads with his bosses that “I tried to fix it,” whereupon they tell him that that only made it worse and he should have reported the mistake to them instead). Within several acts he’s not only following Chastity around, he’s getting in his face despite her taking out a restraining order against him, and he ultimately gets arrested and falls from his perch as an attorney to the depths of imprisonment. Naturally, being the creation of “inspirational” author Victoria Christopher Murray, Xavier’s fall from grace is anticipated by his admission, at a dinner date for Chastity and her friends, that he’s an agnostic while they all grew up in the church and still believe in God.

Meanwhile, Chastity meets up with her childhood sweetheart, Roger Thompkins (Romeo Miller, former rapper L’il Romeo, who in real life is 10 years younger than Michelle Williams). Roger makes his living teaching karate and running a dojo on the island they both grew up on, though the issue that broke them up is that he wanted to stay there and she wanted a career as a big-city lawyer. There’s a thinly veiled message here against interracial relationships that carried over into The Wrong High School Sweetheart as well: both stories are about successful, professional Black women who suffer when they get romantically and sexually involved with white males and get redeemed when they return to partnering with Black men. (One would never guess from these stories that the two most powerful and influential Black women in the country right now, Vice President Kamala Harris and newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, are both in long-term marriages to white men.) Needless to say, some of the karate moves Roger teaches Chastity come in handy when she has to defend herself against Xavier’s assault at the end! Directed by Troy Scott, Wrath is an O.K. Lifetime movie – despite the faith-based trappings it’s really a stalker story like the ones Lifetime has done hundreds of times before – and though it does have some hot soft-core porn scenes between Michelle Williams and Antonio Cupo (and a lot of nice topless scenes showing Cupo’s pecs), that’s not enough to redeem a strictly by-the-numbers Lifetime formula piece.