Bodyguard Seduction (Shadowbozer Filsm, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I put on the Lifetime “premiere” movie, Bodyguard Seduction, a 2022 effort from the Johnson Production Group and their usual house director, Lindsay Hartley, and writer, Paul A. Birkett. Until recently I’ve known Hartley primarily as an actress – her imdb.com page describes her as “an actress and singer” – and I’ve been impressed with her clear chops as a director but quite frankly I’d like to see her work with other writers than Birkett, especially women writers. Bodyguard Seduction is one of those movies where there’s an annoying clash of sensibilities between the female director ahd the male writer, and I suspect either Hartley herself or another woman writer would have made this story more credible and brought a femnist “edge” to it the film desperately needed. The central character is Charly Huxton (Jessica Morris), who’s graduated from supermodel to businesswoman. She’s started a company that makes female sportswear and she owns 51 percent of it, which means her word is law. Her business partner, Lark Embridge (Alicia Blasingame), is chafing at her domination, especially since though Charly had the name and reputation, Lark actually brought the design expertise into the company. Without running it by Charly, Lark also has brought in her own designer, Godfrey Lewis (Jesse Klick) and given him carte blanche to sneak onto Charly’s computer and change her designs.

The film opens with Charly being interviewed by a TV reporter who wants the dish on her recent breakup with a movie star called Dylan (presumably his first name, though we never hear whatever other names he might have) over a year before. It’s established through this interview that Charly hasn’t “dated” (i.e., had sex with) anyone since her breakup with Dylan, and given Paul A. Birkitt’s sexist view of the world we’re clearly supposed to assume that the reason Charly is behaving like such a bitch at work is sheer sexual frustration. We;re clearly supposed to believe that what Charly needs more than anything to turn her back into a human being is a good stiff cock up her cunt, and said good stiff cock turns up attached to a nice-looking if not drop-dead gorgeous young man named Jonathan Makepeace (Ross Jirgi). His imdb.com page says he’s of Norwegian,Finnish and Czech ancestry – though it doesn’t say which of those gave him his last name – and it also says he has an older brother, Ryan Jirgi, who’s an American football coach (a defensive coordinator for Bates College in Lewiston, Maine). We first meet Jonathan – whose last name, “Makepeace,” my husband Charles recognized from a 1980 film called My Bodyguard, in which the title character is an older schoolkid who takes on the job of bodyguard to two younger kids to keep them from being bullied; the actor who played the bodyguard was Chris Makepeace – and his old Marine buddy Anthony Vargas (Ryan Francis) on the set of a TV series featuring an egomaniacal star named “Harvey” for whom the two were working as personal assistants.

When “Harvey” disappears into a green room labeled as his with a young woman in tow, we first assume that it’s for a round of quasi-consensual sex in which the woman is agreeing to the star’s demands in hopes of more money and/or a bigger role. One of the assistants even comments to the other that the woman was an extra but “she’s going to get a speaking part” for this. Then, as the two assistants wait in front of the closed door for “Harvey” and the girl to finish whatever it is they’re doing, the two play rock-paper-scissors to decide which of them will face the potentially career-ending task of letting “Harvey” know he needs to finish his fun and games and report back to the set. Just then, as Jonathan loses the game and screws up his courage to knock on the door, he hears a woman scream from inside the green room and crashes the door to rescue her. “Harvey” announces that he’s going to fire both of them and blacklist them so they can never work in Hollywood or anywhere else again. When this scene first came on I assumed that “Harvey” and Charly’s ex, “Dylan,” were the same person and their breakup had been triggered by similar shenanigans she caught him engaging in earlier – but no-o-o-o-o, the only purpose of the scene is to explain why Jonathan was available to be hired by Lark to be Charly’s bodyguard and why Lark thought he would be incompetent in the job. It seems that Lark has worked out an elaborate plan to drive Charly out of the company they founded, and hiring Jonathan is part of it. She also gets Godfrey to try to run Charly down in a stolen car; Jonathan catches on in time to save Charly and take a few pot-shots at the car with his gun, but a shaken Godfrey makes the mistake of complaining to Lark about the risk she put him in. Lark off-handedly kills Godfrey with the identical sort of gun to the one Jonathan used to shoot at the car, then plants a bullet from Jonathan’s gun into Godfrey’s fatal wound in hopes that a ballistics test will link the bullet to Jonathan’s gun to frame him for Godfrey’s murder.

Jonathan and Charly are at the police station when the detective in chage of the case announces he’s going to put them both under arrest – he for murder and she for obstructing justice – only, in the sort of utterly preposterous scene Paul A. Birkett loves to write, Jonathan attacks the cop who’s trying to arrest him with a judo throw and the two of them flee. They first ask Anthony to hide them out, but Anthony is getting harassing phone calls from gamblers he owes a lot of money to and he figures the best way to get the money he needs is to sell out Jonathan and Charly to Lark. He demands $200,000 and Lark offers him $100,000 plus stock options in the company, only in exchange he’s not only supposed to kill Jonathan and Charly but destroy their bodies utterly. Anthony duly shows up with a silencer-equipped gun – given the way adding a silencer to a pistol accentuates its already phallic qualities by making it longer, it becomes an odd counterpoint to all the wild soft-core porn we’re getting between Jonathan and Charly – only Charly flees in time and goes to another hiding place she uses. When they get there Jonathan is surprised at how quickly she locates the hidden key so she can let them in, and though Anthony has followed them there and shows up with his silencer-equipped gun, Charly talks him out of killing him there because the place is Lark’s and she won’t approve of him dirtying up her blankets and carpets with their blood. Eventually Lark shows up and she and Charly have a struggle to the death, as do Jonathan and Anthony, and at the end the cops arrive, summoned by a phone call to 911 Charly made on her phone. Charly also records Lark making a confession to the crime, and though Lark insists that the call will never be admissible and the attorneys she can afford to hire will get it thrown out, eventually they’re arrested and Charly gets both her company back and her hot stud muffin of a bodyguard.

Bodyguard Seduction offered many delights for this old Gay man, including lots of beefcake poses of Ross Jirgi’s hot bod with great, muscular pecs. My favorite scene takes place in Charly’s company’s restroom, where Jonathan has gone to change clothes after he’s spilled coffee all over himself and we get some choice glimpses of him wearing nothing but tight black undies (and director Hartley gets as close to his basket as she dares given that she’s working for Americna basic cable). What irked me about this film is the basic sexism of its plot, particularly the idea that the only reason Charly is being such a total bitch to her staff is she hasn’t been laid in over a year, and she needs Jonathan’s member inside her to turn her back into a decent human being. A more feminist writer might have done wonders for the basic plot, including offering more insight into how differently men and women are treated in the business world and how Charly in particular is looked down on because she’s drop-dead gorgeous, she used to be a model and she’s assumed to have no head for business at all. Director Hartley gets a first-rate performance out of Jessica Morris as Charly – the two of them manage to turn Birkett’s male wish-fulfillment fantasy about her into a fully fledged, richly complex human being – but everybody else is one-dimensional, either all good or all bad. In somethimg Birkett is wont to do – he’s done it in his other Lifetime scripts, too – he plants ambiguous hints that Jonathan may be a willing, aware participant in Lark’s plot against Charly (a series of text messages back and forth between his phone and someone else’s saying that Charly is their mutual problem) but then drops them as soon as they make their point. As I said, I’d like to see Lindsay Hartley direct a film with a script written by a woman; until then, she seems doomed to do the best she can with stupid, sexist scripts written by men and expressing ultra-macho fantasies of who women are ahd what they want.