Danger Below Deck, a.k.a. Sugar (Sepia Films, Connect3 Media, Kanan Films, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 4) Lifetime showed two movies my husband Charles and I watched, one pretty bad and one unusually good. The pretty bad one was called Danger Below Deck, though imdb.com listed it under the working title Sugar, and it’s about two young women, Chloe Belle (Katherine MacNamara) and Melanie Roussard (Jasmine Sky Sarin), who meet at a fancy club in Canada. Chloe got in via her sort-of boyfriend Jules (Éric Bruneau) while Melanie sneaked in. The club turns out to be one of those uncompromisingly dreary places that for some reason has become impossibly trendy – the predictably officious door person slams the doors shut and leaves out a long line of people trying to get in – and Jules is there along with his friends Carl (Kwame Onwuachi – he’s Black, as if you couldn’t tell from that mouthful of an African name), Issac [sic] (Patch May), and Sean (Anthony Timpano). All these men are engaged in some form of organized crime involving both diamonds and drugs. Jules has offered Chloe a fabulous vacation on board a cruise liner, and initially Chloe is reluctant but ultimately agrees to go if Melanie can accompany her. At loose ends because she used to work in a jewelry store but got fired for spending too much time texting Chloe on her phone, Melanie ends up on the liner and she and Sean are attracted to each other. The liner is on its way to Sydney, Australia with stopovers in Panama and Tahiti, and on a lark Melanie hires a cab in Panama City to follow Sean in the car he’s just got into, which leads them to a secret drug lab in the middle of the Panama countryside and nearly gets them killed by the folks who run it. Melanie is able to get them out by hot-wiring a car – it’s been previously established that his dad is a mechanic and taught her how – but later the two women find out that the drugs from this enterprise, several large packages of cocaine, have been hidden in their cabin aboard the ship.

The two make some half-hearted attempts to escape – one of which is thwarted when the ship’s officious social director, Emma (Audrey Rannou), takes a photo of them getting on a tour bus in Tahiti and immediately posts it online to social media, and the bad guys see it, go to the bus and kidnap them off it. It ends up in a weirdly and oddly inconclusive way: the two women load the drugs in their own suitcases and try to sneak them off the ship. It’s not clear from the script by Ben Johnstone, Annelies Kavan and Vic Sarin (Sarin also directed and I remember seeing his name on a previous Lifetime film and joking, “Ah, this film was directed by a poison gas!”) just what the women intended to do with the drugs, but though they get them off the ship O.K. they’re ultimately arrested by Australian police and held in jail awaiting trial. A slimeball attorney visits them in jail and says that if they plead guilty they can get a reduced sentence, and he stresses the importance that they not rat out anyone else in the gang – and Chloe’s suspicions are aroused. She asks the attorney, “Who hired you?,” and when he won’t answer she tells him he’s fired. Sean visits them in prison and urges them to talk, and it turns out he was busted on a previous drug run by Australian police and allowed to go free if he’d become an informant and help them nail some higher-ups. Chloe calls her dad in North America and he offers to help but she doesn’t take him up on it, and the film ends with the two women in jail and no indication of what they’re going to do next and whether they’ll testify against the really bad guys who got them into this pickle or not. Oh, and did I mention that Chloe is a coke addict herself, or that there was a big, fat gangster after her back in Canada before she left on the cruise who was demanding a large sum of money she didn’t have? I’ve seen a lot of pretty silly movies on Lifetime, but Danger Below Deck was one of the silliest, and it didn’t even have the satisfaction of an inspiring ending (I was hoping the women would turn in the other gang members, enter the Australian version of witness protection, and become heroines) to redeem it.