by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie, Swindler Seduction, was as bad as Let’s Get Physical was good, a compendium of all the ways in which a Lifetime movie can go wrong: a preposterous plot concocted by one of those writers (Liz Lake) who, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, seems determined to write at least six impossible things before breakfast every day; a level of naïveté in the leading characters verging on imbecility; neck-snapping reversals; and an overall air of unbelievability. It’s actually more or less (I suspect less) based on a true story, that of Jordan and Simon Gann, identical twins born into a well-to-do family in Methuen, Massachusetts in 1980, who as they were growing up did such a good job ripping off their parents that in 1999 both mom and dad disowned them. They eventually adopted a modus operandi in which they contacted well-to-do (or not so well-to-do) victims, mostly (though not exclusively) women, and would pose as super-rich investment bankers or venture capitalists. Their marks would accept their offer for a lavish dinner, only when it came time to pay the bill one or the other Gann would say they had “lost” their wallet with all their credit cards, and as pay-by-phone systems became more common they would say they lost their phone as well. Gradually the women realized they had been “taken” and ripped off of an expensive dinner tab, and in some cases more than that. In one instance Simon threatened a woman who had filed a complaint against him that he would reveal details of her sex life if she didn’t agree not to testify against him – though she ended up reporting that threat to the police and they added it to the charges against him.
There had already been a Discovery Channel documentary episode about the Ganns, “Evil Twins,” as part pf a series called The Family Curse, which aired in 2018 In this film the principal victim is Louisa Russell (Gabrielle Graham), a Black woman who works as a medical executive and goes on a weekend convention with her close friend and co-worker, Brooke Gomez (Tanisha Thammavongsa, who according to her imdb.com page is half-Asian and half-Canadian; she certainly looks like a person of color on screen, but it's hard to tell what color even though her on-screen boyfriend, Daniel Jun as “Alex,” is Asian: Korean, to be exact). Brooke is committed to Alex but Louisa is single and all too eager to let hot, hunky young Steve Johnson (Colton Haynes) has his way with her, especially after he’s told her (and somehow got her to believe) that he’s an investment banker and venture capitalist with several homes all across the country and a personal friendship with rapper 50 Cent. Louisa falls for his charms hook, line and sinker, and the two spend much of the weekend having hot soft-core porn sex (nicely staged by director Jonathan Wright, though other Lfetime directors have given us hotter sex scenes within the strictures of basic cable). It takes a while for Louisa to realize that Steve has stuck her with a lot of debt, that his promise to buy her and her friends cars was hogwash, and that she’s out quite a bit of money which she really couldn’t afford to lose. At one point we see Steve in a heated phone conversation/argument with his identical twin brother Mitch (also played by Colton Haynes) which lets us know that he has a brother, though at this point it’s not certain whether Steve and Mitch are partners in crime or Mitch is the proverbial “good brother” that is tired of bailing out (figuratively and literally) Steve from his antics.
What’s more, Louisa finds out that she’s pregnant by Steve – or is it Mitch? That becomes an issue later on in the movie. Unable at first to get the local police interested in doing anything about the case, Louisa takes so much time off work she jeopardizes her employment to track down Steve. She ultimately starts a blog about Steve and his crimes, and gets a lot of followers posting “me, too” accounts of their own interactions with him. We also see one of the brothers going after Holly Stokes (Megan Hutchings), a successful realtor; since Holly is white, instead of bragging about knowing 50 Cent he claims to have been Matt Damon’s stunt double in the film The Talented Mr. Ripley. Thanks to Louisa’s good works Steve is ultimately convicted, but Mitch is still out there, free and clear, waiting to destroy Louisa’s life out of revenge and take her son Hal away. Mitch claims that he, not Steve, is Hal’s father, and he’s going to sue her for custody and take Hal away from her. Hal, meanwhile, is no great prize; he was born prematurely and brain-damaged, and Louisa and her mother had to hire a full-time nurse-therapist for him. The denouement takes so long for the story to arrive that they needed two kids to play Hal, Baeyan Hoffman as a baby and Jo Sias as an eight-year-old, and eventually Holly and Louisa get together to trap Mitch after Louisa has mistakenly given him her address and phone number, thinking he was another victim who wanted to meet with her. Holly takes over a so-called “show house” and lures Mitch to meet them there, but Mitch sees through the imposture when he notices that the cupboards are all empty.
He’s furious,and of course Louisa, like so many other stupid heroines in Lifetime movies, tries to escape him by fleeing upstairs. Mitch corners Louisa in the master bedroom and is in the process of strangling her to death when the police fortuitously arrive in time to save her, and the whole film has been narrated by Louisa herself as the interviewee on a true-crime podcast. In the end Steve and Mitch end up in adjoining cells of the same prison – what real-life corrections official would do something like have co-conspirators who are also identical twins in cells next door to each other in the same prison? – and Steve gets a couple of years added to his sentence for assaulting his brother, but the implication is that they’re going to get out while they’re still relatively young and attractive and will continue their lives of crime, jointly and severally. (That’s what’s happened to the real Gann brothers, too, according to a Cinemaholic blog post put up in 2021, three years after the Discovery documentary aired in 2018, https://thecinemaholic.com/where-are-jordan-and-simon-gann-now/; according to that post, “neither of their current whereabouts are known as of today.”) There are some good aspects to Swindler Seduction, notably Colton Haynes’ skill in differentiating between the two brothers’ personalities; he really draws a believable distinction between the easy-going con-artist Steve and the psychopathic Mitch, even though it’s a bit hard to believe that con artists would turn as violent as Mitch does at the end. But for the most part, Swindler Seduction is pretty silly, and given that Lifetime’s writers and directors are usually more subtle and multidimensional than usual when they’re telling a true story, or something with its roots in one, this stood as a major disappointment from them.
