My Husband's Seven Wives (RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 28) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called My Husband’s Seven Wives, originally shot under the working title He Had Seven Wives but obviously changed to sound more “Lifetime-y.” The man with the titular seven wives is Alan Davis (Adam Harper), a good-looking but not drop-dead gorgeous man (though there are a few side shots showing an ample basket, which may be the explanation for why so many women are attracted to him) who claims to be a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company in Georgia. He does really work for the drug company he says he does, but he’s in their information technology department and doesn’t do any work-related travel. Alan’s wife Maggie (Kristi Murdock) starts catching on when she goes shopping and her credit card is declined. Alan drives a fancy and quite conspicuous Chevrolet Corvette sports car – he fusses over the car more than he does any of the women in his harem and the car practically becomes a character in and of itself – and one day Maggie recognizes Alan’s car in the open garage of someone else’s home. (She knows it’s his because of the large blue velvet dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.) The someone else turns out to be Pam (Christina Licciardi), and when Maggie walks into the garage Pam naturally thinks she’s a prowler. Pam explains that the car belongs to her husband, and Maggie says it belongs to her husband. They compare photos of their husbands on their cell phones and realize they’re both married to the same man. Maggie’s first thought is to report Alan to the police for bigamy, but Pam talks her out of it by pointing out that if they turn him in to the authorities, they’ll never be able to recover the money Alan has embezzled from both of them.

The two plot to go after Alan’s secret accounts, and as they search they encounter more of Alan’s wives, including hard-bitten Kristen (Kylie Delre) and her precocious high-school age son Max (the genuinely cute Nathan Lee); Katie (K. J. Baker); Selma (Bonny Brewer); and his most recent conquest, the racially ambiguous Adrian (Amanda Rosario Glass), who’s still in the first throes of love with Alan and has a hard time realizing that he’s been married to other women and hasn’t bothered divorcing any of them first. Alan, it turns out, also had two previous wives who had died along the way, Heather and Amy, which led both Charles and I to try to suss out the chronology and figure out just which of Alan’s wives had the true legal title. (Writer Matt Fitzsimmons wasn’t too helpful on that score, and I got the impression he couldn’t have cared less.) Maggie and Pam set up a command center in a back room of the library where Maggie works to run their search for Alan’s elusive finances, since his modus operandi is to open joint bank accounts in his name along with that of his wife de jour and then loot the money and keep it for himself. When Kristen joins the group she insists that she can’t follow a written document and needs the information laid out on a whiteboard, so Maggie produces a whiteboard and starts a cop show-style chart of Alan’s various wives and some of their offspring. (It’s not clear whether Alan has any biological children or they’re all the products of his wives’ previous marriages. Frankly, I hoped the latter because I really wouldn’t want to see Alan’s scumbag genes passed on to future generations.)

Midway through the story it takes a dark turn when a couple of Black thugs, Curtis (Brendan Goshay) and Buddy (LaTrallo Presley), kidnap Maggie, put her into a body bag, tie her up and threaten to throw her in a lake (this all takes place in Georgia, by the way, and we know from the actors’ risible accents early on that we’re somewhere in the South). It turns out that Alan scammed their gangsta boss out of $30,000 and they want it back. Fortunately, Curtis at least has some normal human sympathies and Maggie is able to persuade him to back off and give her a week or so to collect the money. It all ends when Max (either Alan’s son or his stepson, see above) figures out a way to hack into Alan’s accounts and steal back the money – he does this with Alan’s cooperation as a way of hiding his funds from the avaricious women who are trying to collect them – and they end up with $250,000 in cash, while the women finally call the police and Alan is arrested. Only Maggie obtains the money in cash and stashes it in her dishwasher, and unexpectedly Alan makes bail (how? Even if he had another reserve of cash stashed somewhere, how could he get at it?) and steals the money back. Ultimately, though, Maggie and the others figure out Alan’s true hiding place for the bulk of his ill-gotten fortune – it’s secreted behind a stucco wall in his office and Maggie inadvertently discovers it when she takes down a photo of Alan with his Corvette, says, “I always hated that car,” and smashes her fist into the wall, revealing Alan’s cash stash. (That’s also a puzzling twist because there isn’t a secret door behind the framed photo, so there’s no clear indication of just how Alan could access the cash when he wanted to spend some of it.) The five living wives of Alan Davis divide up the money between them after presenting Max (ya remember Max?) with a cashier’s check to cover tuition for college, where he plans to major in business and become a big-time financier (thereby essentially pursuing the same sort of career Alan is, only legally).

Though I was expecting a plot twist that Max was secretly still in league with Alan and he was responsible for the disappearance of the $250,000, for the most part My Husband’s Seven Wives kept a relatively light tone – even the Black gangstas have a cartoonish quality to them – much like a movie I vaguely remember (and can’t recall the title of at the moment) that also featured an unlikely duo or trio of women each trying to recover the fortunes they’ve lost to a scumbag man with whom they were both romantically involved. Charles noted that it was basically just a “treasure-hunt movie” reworked for the modern era, but while hardly the best thing I’ve seen, even on Lifetime, it was fun and pleasant, effectively directed by Louise Alston (reversing the usual Lifetime formula of having a female writer and a male director!), who maintains the suspense and gives it an overall light tone even though through the final stages we keep expecting a trick ending that never comes.