Lifetime
Watching Lifetime movies is like riding a rollercoaster. You’re going along and get some highs like Buried Alive and Survived, The Bear Lake Murders and Trapped in the Spotlight, and then you get whipped around in an instant with some very low lows like The Life I Can’t Remember, Held Hostage in My House, and this latest ‘thriller’ — in the loosest sense of the word — Date at Your Own Risk … a movie that even Lifetime seems embarrassed by because it’s not even listed on IMDb! So what’s it about?
Date at Your Own Risk takes a look at what it’s like to date in the age of social media and dating apps. Mary Antonini stars as Eva, a young woman in Chicago who works for a law firm and has had a terrible dating record. Her best friend Jesse (Patricia Lavres) is trying to get her back into the dating scene but warns her not to just jump into something with the first guy who connects with her on the app. Jesse shows Eva another app that actually warns women about potential daters, operated by other women, with photos and descriptions of their encounters with the men in question. And the men have no access to the app. The first guy who Eva connects with seems cool but they look him up on the app and … he’s married! He gets an immediate block from Eva. Not long after, Eva is surprised to discover her ex-boyfriend Will has moved back to Chicago after he shows up at lunch with his mother and Eva (a set-up) and — in an even bigger surprise — he has moved into a building right across the street from hers. Coincidence? It’s never really clear what happened between the two (he cheated, perhaps) but Eva is willing to put the past behind her but they will remain firmly in the friend zone.
Things are going along just fine until Eva sees Will arguing with another young woman outside of his building. But she keeps it moving and goes into her own apartment, but while taking out the trash the mystery woman comes at her and tells her in a very threatening manner to stay away from Will. Eva tells Will about the encounter and he assures her that the woman, Zuri (Vanessa Grace Jackson) is a bit disturbed and he will have a talk with her. But Eva just sees one red flag after another and tries to put some distance between herself and Will, although it seems his mother has a different event every other day that she has to attend so he is unavoidable. When Eva learns of the disappearance of another young woman, she volunteers with the people running the dater warning app to try and find her. She even agrees to come to Will’s place, with Jesse, for a night of cards like old times. Even Jesse is warming up to Will at this point, but when Eva and Will are alone and enjoying some wine, Eva wakes up the next morning with a crazy headache — he blames the cheap wine — and when she goes to the volunteer center she is persona non grata because she allegedly shared a lot of screen caps from the app and now all the men know about it. Eva has no idea what is happening, but the bottle of pills she took from Will’s apartment and another warning posting for a guy named Mike who looks exactly like Will begins to concern Eve, as does the sudden appearance again of Zuri screaming at Eva that Will is a liar, again with no context. The situation begins to escalate and Eva and Jesse really begin to question if Will is Mike, especially after Eva gets a text message from Zuri asking her to meet at a house outside of Chicago … and to come alone. At this point she should have heard Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost: ‘You in danger, girl’. So who is waiting for Eva at the house — Will? Zuri? Mike? And will any of this make sense in the end?
Lifetime
Date at Your Own Risk is a long slog that has very little in the way of thrills, or coherence. Writer Courtney Cilman has the thinnest of plots to work with and makes the characters do stupid things just to fill the movie’s less-than-90-minutes run time. For instance — why is Eva still hanging out with Will’s mother? Why is she having lunch with her, why are she and her mother having dinner with her (and the dinner party ended up just being the three of them and Will, and Eva’s mother is not shy about showing her disdain for him), why are they attending whatever charity events she’s throwing (in which Will bids on an insanely expensive necklace and then forces Eva to stand in front of the crowd while he puts it on her and his mother proclaims them a ‘lovely couple’). Girl, just say no! If her relationship and whatever led to the break-up was so bad, you have no business being anywhere near Will or his mother. Also something that makes zero sense is Zuri’s behavior. In the end it turns out she just wanted to warn Eva about Will’s true nature but instead of just calmly approaching her, say, at the coffee shop or bar where she and Jesse hang out, she just runs shrieking out of the shadows like a lunatic. There’s also no attempt to provide a red herring to make you question if Will is Mike. There are no other men to suspect (except the one white guy Eva has a date with who just stands and stares in her direction like a psycho when she goes back to her place — he does not look anything like Will/Mike, obviously, so he’s just a weirdo we never see again). And Eva never even tries to defend herself when she’s accused of violating the terms of the dater beware app. Had she done so, and had the other women not been so swift to judge her, they may have actually had a lead in the missing woman. Everything in this story is just one tired old trope after another.
On the plus side, the cast, for the most part, does the best job they can with what they’re given. Antonini gives a fine performance as Eva, but the writing fails her. Patricia Lavres is actually terrific as Jesse, the one character who actually has her wits about her and tries to act as Eva’s voice of reason. Shane Marriott does a good job of maintaining Will’s ‘I’m a good guy now’ demeanor, never giving away that he is also Mike (but since he’s the only guy in the movie, again, there is no surprise when he turns out to be Mike). Arlene Duncan is also good as Eva’s mother, unashamed to tell anyone how she really feels about Will or his mother Rayna. Lanette Ware as Rayna is a bit one-note, her character supposedly this wealthy doyenne of Chicago society, yet she never really looks expensive (she actually reminded me of Tiffany ‘New York’ Pollard’s mother, ‘Sister’ Patterson). Unfortunately Vanessa Grace Jackson gets the worst of it all by her badly written character, only given the change to be hysterical in her three major scenes.
Director Cat Hostick guides the movie through its motions at a leisurely pace, keeping it all devoid of any suspense, mystery or thrills, allowing the cast to just say their lines and give the best performance they can with the material they’ve been given. In the end, if you’ve managed to stay awake, you’ll probably be angry that you wasted your time on Date at Your Own Risk (perhaps it should be renamed Watch at Your Own Risk) and will completely understand why no one has listed this on their IMDb pages.
Date at Your Own Risk has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.