Lifetime
Lifetime’s latest ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ movie gives us a bank heist gone wrong, but with a totally unexpected twist that comes out of left field and takes us into Dog Day Afternoon territory (IFKYK).
Ten Thousand Reasons for Revenge stars Meredith Riley Stewart as single, working mom Laura Kingman, struggling to make ends meet for her and her daughter Anna, played by Addisyn Grace Cain, star player/captain of the high school field hockey team. Things get worse financially when Laura’s hours are cut at the senior care facility where she works as a nurse, but her boss has offered to hook her up with a relative who can also offer her some work. Grateful for the job and extra cash, Anna then drops the news on her mom that she got accepted into a prestigious, and expensive, college and Laura assures her that she will make it work. But what about Anna’s boyfriend, Max, who planned for them both to attend the local community college? Anna says that was Max’s plan, not hers, and she has to figure out a way to tell him. One evening while biking home from a team celebration, Anna comes upon a pickup truck sitting at the side of the dirt road. She approaches it and sees a man slumped over inside, and when she opens the door she is certain he’s dead from what appears to be a bullet wound in his stomach. She also notices a duffel bag on the passenger seat full of cash. At the moment, she has no idea the man had robbed a bank earlier in the afternoon – just after Laura had left the bank as she was applying for a loan (which was later denied) – but taking some of that money could solve some of her tuition issues. Anna does call 9-1-1, but there is nothing that can be done to save the man’s life.
Lifetime
The next day, Anna takes Max back to the site and then she reveals to him that she’s done something terrible … she stole $10,000 of the stolen money (apparently it was a million total), but she’s terrified to take it home so Max offers to keep it at his place until she figures out how she’s going to handle the problem she’s created. To make matters worse, the city wants to give Anna a ‘good citizen’ award – Laura sort of pushes her into accepting it, unaware that the last thing Anna needs is publicity – and it all goes well … but Anna is being eaten up by the guilt of taking the money. Laura is shocked when her daughter comes clean, but she knows she has to contact the detective who they met at the ceremony, and who had already reached out to talk more to Anna about the incident (which Laura refused to let him do). She contacts Detective Wilkes about returning it and he suggests rather than her coming to the station, he will come to her the next morning. Laura is unaware that Wilkes has been staking out Max’s house and when she and Anna go there to retrieve the money, Wilkes now knows exactly where the money is. The only problem is … Wilkes is a crooked cop and it was a very good friend of his, Jim, who stole the money and is now dead, with $990,000 sitting in police custody. Now he’s going to take the $10,000 and he’s going to make Laura repay him the rest any way possible. He makes sure Laura knows he’s serious by first nearly killing her favorite patient, Calvin, beating up her new boss while suggesting to the wife that he’s sleeping with his girlfriend Laura, and then pops back at the nursing facility to let her boss Demetri know that Laura has a shady past involving fraud. Technically it was her ex-husband and she had nothing to do with any of that, and he went to prison, but now Demetri is concerned how this will look to his superiors and to the community (even though it all happened a decade earlier), so he suspends Laura until he can figure out how to handle that situation. Wilkes, however, is becoming more and more unhinged, showing up at Anna’s school, telling her that her mom has been injured in an accident and he’ll take her to her mom, but it begins to become clear to Anna that Wilkes is dangerous, and by the way he talks about Jim, their relationship may have been much deeper than just drinking buddies (and a flashback as Wilkes explains the whole plan to Laura and Anna makes it explicitly clear that Wilkes and Jim were lovers). Luckily, Laura and Anna had already gone to the police and met with Detective Blevins, who told them that Wilkes was already under an internal investigation because he was believed to be a dirty cop. She believes their story about his connection to the robbery and the violence against Laura’s friends and an assault on Max, but she needs proof … so Laura and Anna are going to be bait. Unfortunately, the police are stationed outside of Wilkes’ house … and he isn’t there, he’s with Laura and Anna. Will they be able to talk Wilkes down before he murders them, and will Det. Blevins get to the house before there is any more violence?
Ten Thousand Reasons for Revenge is a pretty interesting thriller. I don’t recall many bank heist storylines from Lifetime, so this one was a bit of a refreshing change of pace from the usual abduction/blackmail/revenge thrillers from the network. Charlie Mihelich’s (There’s a New Killer in Town) screenplay does a nice job of introducing the characters and setting up the bank robbery, which we don’t know until later in the film that it wasn’t just a lone wolf robbery. There is a flashback dropped into the middle of the story showing Wilkes and Jim chatting about the heist, but at that point there is still no suggestion of a romantic relationship between the two men. That was a surprising twist that really came out of nowhere, but it added some depth to the story as to why they would risk such a thing – they just wanted to run off to Mexico and live their lives. The screenplay also convincingly depicts Anna’s growing guilt over time to the point that it actually begins to affect her health and emotional state, at one point gulping down half a decanter of rum at Max’s house and passing out, then finally getting home late, still under the effects of the booze and lashing out at her mother. There are a couple of plot holes, such as how did Wilkes get into the nursing facility, how did he know Calvin was Laura’s favorite patient, how did he know who her other boss was, and how did he know to stake out Max’s house – and how did he know where Max even lived – the night Laura and Anna went to get the money? There was no way he would have even known Max had the money in his possession. And why does Demetri feel the need to suspend Laura for something her husband did ten years ago just because a detective felt the need to show up out of the blue and deliver this news? (It would have made more sense had Wilkes let drop that he suspected Laura had something to do with the missing $10,000.) But, despite the questions, the movie still works, keeping you on the edge of your seat and surprising you with that major plot twist. Director Danny J. Boyle (The Bear Lake Murders) does a nice job of keeping the story moving, not lingering on the plot holes, and drawing some good performances from his cast.
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Turning in a really terrific performance is Addisyn Grace Cain as Anna. She really feels like a typical high schooler, really passionate about her sport and her future, just a kid who gets caught up in a really bad situation and does what kids are prone to do – something dumb. Cain does a great job of showing Anna’s deteriorating state as the guilt begins to consume her, along with the fear that she’s going to go to prison for what she did, but she finally gets her bearings again when she unburdens herself to her mother and then Det. Blevins. She really does give a perfectly spot-on performance. Meredith Riley Stewart is fine as Laura, but for me it didn’t feel like she was connecting with the material or her character. Her best relationship in the movie was probably with Calvin because they really seemed to have a bond. Perhaps she was concerned about being the harried single mom always trying to hide from her daughter how not great their financial situation was, but it just made her performance a little flat, like she was just reciting her lines instead of being in the moment.
Ian Reier Michaels is appropriately menacing as Wilkes. Even when he first pays a visit to Laura’s house he is suspicious enough for her to not let him speak with Anna. His portrayal could then turn frighteningly violent, and he does a great job of showing Wilkes slowly unravelling, while also giving a very tender performance in the flashback with Jim, which helps explain his anger about Jim’s death and Wilkes’ belief that Anna let him die to steal the money. He’s lost his mind because he lost his love — and a million bucks — and Michaels plays the irrationality perfectly. Rizal Patagoc plays Max as the nicest, sweetest, most considerate, caring boyfriend in the world … and he doesn’t even take it personally when Anna treats him like shit. Even when she finally admits she’s going to college in Chicago, even though his heart is broken just a bit, Patagoc’s Max turns that hurt around and tells Anna how cool that is and how proud he is of her. This guy is definitely boyfriend material, and Patagoc just makes him irresistible. Robert Keli only has a few short scenes as Jim, and he plays Jim’s final moments more realistically than I think I’ve ever seen someone play a death scene, his cries of pain non-stop until he dies. He really portrayed that pain to the point that you feel it too. In his two flashbacks, he first catches up with Wilkes like any old friends, but he gives Jim a real tenderness as he and Wilkes go over the plan the night before the robbery and look forward to their lifelong happiness somewhere that isn’t the small Texas town where they currently reside. Myles Cranford is also delightful as Calvin, trying to hide his snacks from Laura, and offering her some ‘girl, you’re in a world of trouble’ advice when she confides in him what’s happening (which unfortunately, somehow, leads to him nearly being murdered). It’s not really clear if he was injected with air or some drug, but it was a relief that he survived because he was a cool dude. The rest of the supporting cast also give some excellent performances, making the whole environment feel like a real place and time.
I had to take a point off for the plot holes and questions that were left lingering, but Ten Thousand Reasons for Revenge is still a nifty bank heist thriller with a surprising twist, good writing and direction, and a pretty terrific cast.
Ten Thousand Reasons for Revenge has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.