by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the latest
Lifetime offering in what they’ve taken to calling their “Saturday Night
SoCial” series (at least I think that’s the typography they want from this series!), Sole Custody, one of those shrieking melodramas Lifetime puts
on that would actually be better if the writers (Gary Imhoff and Brian Young)
and the director (Brenton Spencer) had possessed what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
called “the supreme facility of the artist: the gift of knowing when to stop.”
The plot — actually there are several plots bumping into each other like
crash-’em cars at an old-style amusement park, but the two main ones are the
increasing estrangement between two police officers who are also married to
each other and the parents of a seven-year-old son, and the case the woman in
this relationship is working on in which she’s going online to pose as a
teenage girl and thereby attract a particularly elusive serial rapist the
department is after. The rapist is especially skilled in computer hacking and
is able to jump around enough so that the cops can’t trace him to any one ISP
or computer network. The cops are Our Heroine, Zoey Logue (the last name isn’t
listed on imdb.com but it’s the one I thought I saw on a newspaper headline
insert in the show), played by Julie Benz; and her husband Barry (Rick
Ravanello). Barry claims to have to work long hours because he’s undercover on
a case, only when he tells Zoey he didn’t come home one night because he
crashed at his partner’s place after a long shift on the job, the partner
inadvertently “outs” the lie and leaves Zoey convinced that he’s having an
affair. The fact that he’s suddenly become disinterested in sex with Zoey and
is often sleeping on the couch even when he does come home isn’t helping their relationship either.
Zoey has just about had it with Barry when the film opens but is determined to
maintain at least the appearance of a successful marriage for the sake of their
son Tommy (Maxwell Kovach), since Zoey was raised by a single mom and suffered
enough from that she doesn’t want her son to have the same fate.
Unfortunately,
Zoey also has a busybody friend named Ann (Chelah Horsdal) who to my mind is
the real villain of the piece, since her wretched and insistently pushed
“advice” to Zoey on how to handle her potentially straying husband consists of
refusing to talk to him, pushing him out of the house, preventing him from
seeing his son and ultimately filing for divorce while insisting on keeping
both the house and the boy. Barry is understandably freaked out by this, and if
Imhoff and Young had stopped here — with the two hatebirds locked into an
increasingly bitter custody battle over Timmy while still having to work
together as police officers to solve crimes, and with the story of the serial
rapist (ya remember the serial rapist?) and Zoey’s involvement as part of the force’s computer-crimes unit to
apprehend him and set herself up as a decoy to attract him — they could have
had a tight, suspenseful and believable thriller. But of course, being modern
writers — and modern Lifetime writers, at that — they couldn’t (or wouldn’t)
stop there: in the middle of the story Zoey wakes up to find her house is
burning down and she desperately tries to wake up and save Timmy, but can’t
come to in time. What’s weird about this scene is it’s supposed to represent
the turning point in the story, but because earlier sequences had shown Zoey
having nightmares when Barry left her alone in bed all night, it takes us a
while (well, it took me a while,
anyway) to realize that the fire, and Timmy’s death from it, were supposed to
be real events in the story. At least the fire was; for the second half of the
movie Zoey finds herself accused of arson and criminally negligent homicide in
the death of her son, and everyone on the force, including her ex as well as
her current computer-crimes partner Fish (Maxwell Kevin Anderson, whose
imdb.com head shot makes him look considerably hotter than he does in the
movie, where he’s given Buddy Holly glasses and a geeky haircut to establish
him as a standard-issue computer nerd) is convinced she drank, took sleeping
pills, fell asleep smoking a cigarette (she insists she used to be a smoker but had long since quit) and
thereby set her house on fire and killed her son. The main reason they believe
this is that the toxicology report on her while she was unconscious and in the
hospital showed nicotine, alcohol and sleeping pills in her system — and she’s
told throughout the whole second half of the movie, even by her so-called
“friend” Ann, that the “evidence” against her is so overwhelming she should
just accept what she’s done, seek therapy and throw herself on the mercy of the
court as best she can. Naturally, being not only a cop but a thriller heroine
as well, she won’t accept that.
She gets bailed out of jail, only to have her
bail revoked when she sneaks into the police station to peek at the records of
the case, then escapes from jail after subduing a male prisoner almost twice
her size who became violent in the holding area, enlists the aid of a 16-year-old
hacker whom she and her partner previously arrested on suspicion that he was
the serial rapist (the whole plot line about the rapist gets dropped along the
way, though there’s a hint that there really wasn’t a serial rapist and the
16-year-old — who was actually cute in a bearish sort of way — invented the
whole thing and used his hacking skills to make it look like a serial rapist was predating online) and
ultimately realizes that her soon-to-be ex-husband Barry set up the whole
thing. He burned their house down,
after first spiriting Timmy out of it and leaving behind another kid’s body —
an eight-year-old boy who’d been killed in a car accident — with the hoped-for
result that he would have Timmy, his wife would have a murder rap against her, and
he’d retire from the police force and flee the state to join his relatives
elsewhere. The finale features Zoey confronting Barry in a motel on the
outskirts of town just outside the state border and having a violent
confrontation — though she’s savvy enough to turn on the video camera of her
cell phone and thereby broadcast back to police headquarters exactly what’s
going on, including Barry’s confession — in which she shoots out the gas tank
of Barry’s car so he can have
the experience of thinking Timmy is dead — which he isn’t, Zoey having
previously instructed him to play hide-and-seek so he was safe behind a
dumpster when Zoey shot out the gas tank of Barry’s car and the police finally
figure out where the motel is and arrive in time to take Barry into custody. Sole
Custody was actually great fun,
and there was real suspense and uncertainty about the ending (it wouldn’t have
surprised me if Fish had turned out to be both the serial rapist and the
arsonist who burned down Zoey’s house, his motive being a decidedly unrequited
crush on her), but the multiple plot reversals and piling of
credibility-stretching event on top of credibility-stretching event, as well as
the baroque overdirection by Brenton Spencer, made this considerably less
entertaining than it could have been.
