Love at First Lie (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 25) I watched two recent Lifetime movies, a “premiere” called Love at First Lie and a biopic of current R&B/soul star Keyisha Cole called Keyisha Cole: This Is My Story. Love at First Lie is an incredibly overused title – imdb.com lists quite a few other movies using it, including one from just last year – and I wanted to make sure I had the right imdb.com page for the movie Lifetime was showing last night. (I did.) Love at First Lie (this one) was created by the same team that did last March’s Lifetime “premiere,” Home, Not Alone (a title considerably cleverer than anything in the film itself): Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan wrote the “original” story, Adam Rockoff turned it into a screenplay, and Amy Barrett (not the third Donald Trump appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court that provided the crucial vote to overturn Roe v. Wade!) directed, and it’s a pretty typical Lifetime movie. The “pussy in peril” heroine is Kate Burns (Lexie Stevenson), a journalist turned realtor (which sounds like “trading down” to me!) who works for another woman, Vivian (Katelin Chesna, who looks like a modern-day version of Edna May Oliver). Vivian had become a sort of surrogate mother to Kate, helping her through the traumas of a bad four-month relationship with a man named Frank, and she indulges Kate while Kate spends a lot of her “work” time flipping through the photos of eligible young men on a dating app she’s downloaded. Presently she sees and hits the “like” button on a man identified as Walker Stevenson (Greg Kriek, who’s tall, blond, clean-shaven and speaks with a British accent; he’d have been perfect casting as Prince Harry in LIfetime’s biopic except the actor they actually got, Murray Fraser, was even better!).

Walker claims to be a high-end art dealer who goes out of the country a lot and tells the totally smitten Kate that a gang of international criminals is after him and he’s carrying a priceless painting by Pieter Brughel the Elder that’s worth over $6 million which he’s purchased on behalf of a super-rich individual who doesn’t want anyone else in the world to know he owns this particular painting. The moment he said that I assumed he’d turn out to be an international art thief stealing masterworks from established musea or galleries on behalf of ultra-rich people who wanted to own them for their private collections, as in movies like Scotland Yard Investigator and The Fake, but “Walker Stevenson” – or Steven Cammell, to use his true name – turns out to be a more prosaic sort of criminal than that. He’s a con artist who scams professionally successful women by getting them to fall for him and then hand over their credit cards and their life savings to him after claiming to be super-wealthy himself (at one point Kate tells Vivian that Walker lives in a world of such wealth $10,000 is small change to him – Walker, as part of his scam, actually has given Kate a bundle of cash of that amount as so-called “security” for her loaning him her credit card). In a prologue sequence we see Walker pulling this same scam on his ex, Eliza (Skye Coyne), who looks enough like Kate we figure this is Walker’s “type” (tall, thin, leggy, with long raven-black hair). Later Eliza, who’s the closest the writers came to creating a truly multidimensional character, “casually” runs into Kate and gives Walker an enthusiastic endorsement, saying he’s a “keeper” and she should hold on to him – Eliza explains that the only reason she broke up with Walker is she got tired of his constant travels – only Eliza turns up at Kate’s home after Kate has realized Walker is a scam artist. At first she pretends to be a fellow victim, but then she pulls a knife on Kate and declares that she’s avenging Walker because she’s genuinely in love with him.

Kate has finally seen through Walker’s schemes at this point, and there are two Black women helping her to bring Walker to justice. One is a police detective, Carmen Logan (Alicia S. Mason), who’s been researching police and banking records trying to build a forensic case against Walker even though she doesn’t know where he is. The other is a podcaster, Sarah Masters (Jessi Laday), who puts Kate on her podcast and has her tell the story of how she was scammed by Walker. The podcast includes his photo just to warn other potential victims not to fall for him. Detective Logan offers to stake out Kate’s house all night in hopes Walker will come to get her and either kill her or rough her up, only Walker lures her out of her car and clobbers her with a board (later Logan slyly confesses that she’d been out of practice with her street skills because she let herself be so easily overpowered). That’s when Kate gets her visit from Eliza, and later Walker himself shows up and kidnaps her, taking her to a secret location and demanding that she give him the password to her last bank account so he can loot it along with all the others he’s already stolen. Alas, Walker bound her with duct tape, which Kate relatively easily figures out a way to open so she can free herself and go after him with a convenient fireplace poker. Meanwhile, Vivian (ya remember Vivian?) has called Kate’s phone, and while Kate hasn’t answered (she is just a bit occupied!) Vivian’s call has apparently set off the location detector on it and the cops are able to show up at Walker’s redoubt and rescue Kate. Walker escapes, though, and the final scene shows him at a museum in Paris (we know it’s Paris because we see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe) chatting up his latest victim and using yet another name, “Roger Cain.”

Love at First Lie is an O.K. Lifetime movie, basically following the genre conventions, and if it’s of more interest than usual it’s almost exclusively in the character of the villain. For once he’s not openly psychopathic – just a cold, calculating, callous businessman who’s hit on a way to monetize his good looks and surface charm – and though Schenck, Sullivan and Rockoff haven’t given him a deep, dark secret or much of an indication into What Makes Walker Run, that’s probably just as well because it makes him that much more sinister that we can’t peg a deep-seated psychological motive on him.