by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched another Lifetime “world premiere,” with the rather
bland title Stolen from the Suburbs —
leaving me wondering just what
might have been stolen from the suburbs that a Lifetime filmmaker (in this case
Alex Wright, who both wrote and directed the show) would be interested in
depicting. It turned out it wasn’t a what, but a who: Emma (Sydney Sweeney),
restive 16-year-old daughter of Kate (who oddly isn’t listed on the imdb.com
page for the film even though she’s playing the leading role!), a single mom
who moved from Wisconsin to Los Angeles after her husband died and is so
neurotically overprotective she freaks out when Emma tells her she wants to do
horrible, perverted things like hang out at shopping malls and date boys.
Before the main characters are introduced we get a scene showing the modus
operandi of the ring of human traffickers
who will ultimately “steal” Emma and her Black friend Courtney (Tetona Jackson)
from the suburbs, kidnap them and hold them in what amounts to a boot camp for
underage prostitutes of both sexes. Recruiter Johnny (the genuinely hot Mark
Famiglietti — as usual with a hot guy in a Lifetime movie, the moment you meet
him you know he must be up to no
good) approaches a couple of homeless teens, one male and one female, who are
hanging out under a lifeguard tower at a beach. He lures them out with promises
of food, shelter and a place to clean up at the “Los Angeles Teen Shelter,” and
claims there will be no police there and no curfew.
The two are suspicious but
eventually agree to get into Johnny’s white van — whereupon two heavy-set thug
types, Ivan (Rick McCallum) and Mike (Karl Dunster), grab them and tie them up.
Johnny (who’s referred to as “Tom” on the film’s imdb.com page — evidently
there were some changes before the film was finished) is then told by Malena
(also unidentified on imdb.com but played by a quite good blonde actress who
delivers a chilling portrait of matter-of-fact evil, especially later in the
film when she explains to Kate that as far as she’s concerned the kidnapped
children are just merchandise and all she cares about is the money) that homeless kids are already such
damaged goods that they are of little use to her, and he needs to find her nice
suburban teens. Johnny protests that such kids will be more difficult to
recruit, but he accepts the marching orders and turns up at the mall to which
Emma and Courtney have sneaked. Johnny has already got Courtney to accept him
as her boyfriend, and to lure Emma he’s brought along a skinnier, less openly
attractive but still cute guy named Adam — but when Emma tells mom she’s been
with a boy named Adam, Kate grounds her and says she’s not allowed to see boys
unless mom meets and vets them first. Emma escapes from her room and heads for
the mall, where Adam — who we’re not sure at first whether he’s a member of the
ring or an innocent victim himself — gives her a drugged drink and turns her
over to Ivan and Mike in the same sleazy white van we saw in the opening sequence.
From then on the film cuts back and forth between the sex slaves’ boot camp
Malena and the two thugs are running, and the demoralizing and brutal treatment
they put their charges through (in the days of U.S. slavery the process of
breaking down the captives’ will and forcing them to accept their fate was
called “seasoning”), and Kate’s increasingly desperate attempts to find her
daughter and to get the police detectives assigned to the case, Richmond (Neill
Barry) and Cordoba (Sabrina Perez), to give a damn. Stolen from the
Suburbs suffers from didacticism — a more
subtle filmmaker than Alex Wright might have been able to create a story in
which mom’s very overprotectiveness lures Emma to the dark side and shown a
longer seduction process before she realizes what her “boyfriend” really wanted
from her (in real life the pimps who do this sort of recruiting can spend weeks
getting their victims to the point where they’re so convinced the pimps “love”
them that they’re willing to turn tricks to show their own affection), but
instead he seems to be saying, “Girls, when your mother tells you not to date
guys she hasn’t met, just follow her orders, or you’ll end up a sex slave!”
It
also suffers from some pretty gaping plot holes and the usual loose ends of sloppy
thriller writers — including a hint that the sex traffickers have a “mole”
inside the police department, presumably someone they’ve bribed, which Wright
forgets almost as soon as he’s introduced it — and the outrageous plot
contrivance that Kate decides to infiltrate the prostitution ring by posing as
a Lesbian customer interested in buying Courtney’s services. (Emma hasn’t been
listed on the traffickers’ Web postings — which, we’re told, go on above-ground
sites like Craigslist disguised as ads from aspiring actors — because she’s
still a virgin and therefore the mysterious “Syndicate” that runs the
trafficking ring is saving her for a “special” customer.) There’s even a scene
early on in which Kate, who works for a building contractor, tears down a missing-child
poster from a tree near the latest project her boss is developing — he’s told
her to because advertising that children go missing from the neighborhood would
be bad business for the developer — and the volunteer who runs the agency that
put up the poster upbraids her and asks, “What if it was your daughter?” Eventually the volunteer and Kate team up
to run down the traffickers; they find Adam and Kate nearly kills him by
withholding the rescue inhaler he needs, but once they’ve got him to talk a
well-aimed shot by Johnny (who, in addition to his other sordid skills, also
appears to be a talented sniper) takes him out for good, so Kate and the
volunteer child-saver won’t have a live witness they can bring to the police.
For all its messiness, Stolen from the Suburbs is actually quite a good thriller; Wright manages to
sustain the suspense until the end (an all-out shootout at the traffickers’
compound, which seemed difficult to believe — an ending in which they leave the
girls behind but escape themselves would have been both more chilling and more
believable, but then movie traffickers, like movie drug lords, engage in more
and nastier violence than their real-life counterparts and do an awful lot of
shooting that wouldn’t be in their best interests in the real world) and we’re
genuinely in doubt as to how it’s going to turn out and whether mom will save
her daughter in time. Stolen from the Suburbs is gripping filmmaking and well worth watching, and
if Alex Wright can give himself a cleaner and more coherent script next time
(or get someone else to write one for him), his future films should also be
worthwhile entertainment.
