Lifetime
With Christmas just a few days in the rear-view mirror, Lifetime returns to its regularly scheduled programming with a new sports-themed thriller — allegedly based on true events — titled The Hockey Mom’s Revenge, starring Lifetime regular Kate Dailey.
The Hockey Mom’s Revenge begins some time in the past (no actual time frame is given so we’ll have to guess 25 or more years based on the ages of the characters in the present day part of the story) as a young girl named Diane is shown to be an excessively aggressive hockey player on the ice, violently taking out one of the other girls — Unconscious? Concussed? Dead? Whatever it is, she ain’t moving. — after being berated by the coach who keeps trying to impress upon Diane that there is no I in TEAM and the world of hockey does not revolve around her, no matter how good of a player she is (and it is mentioned a few times in the present that she could have gone pro). Flash forward to the present and Diane is now a mom dutifully cheering on her son, Alex (whom she may have pushed into the game to live vicariously through him), but taking things just a bit too far as she constantly feels the need to coach the coach, believing her notes are more helpful to the team than his, and always leaving cupcakes in the boys’ lockers, even after Coach Mike tells her to stop. Diane also rubs the other moms the wrong way, including Rachel and Michelle, whose sons are also on the team. Alex is actually BFFs with Rachel’s son Ethan, and he goes out of his way to help the boy when he needs some equipment, knowing his mom can’t afford to spend a lot of money (she has to do her own home appliance repairs because the dryer and dishwasher keep breaking down). But Diane knows Ethan is a better player than her own son so she sees him, and anyone who supports him, as a threat to Alex’s chances of moving toward a professional hockey career (not that she ever bothered to ask him if that’s what he wants).
Getting wind of a scout coming to see the penultimate game of the season, Diane is prepared to do everything she can to make sure Alex gets noticed, and that includes revealing some startling news to Ethan about his mom and the coach, sabotaging the Zamboni which lands Coach Mike in the hospital with many injuries including a fractured pelvis, attempting to take over coaching, framing Ethan by placing a bottle of booze in his locker, and gaslighting Alex with the suggestion that Ethan is his friend on the ice but speaks badly about him off. The movie goes a bit hilariously off the rails with all of Diane’s actions, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Rachel does some digging and the best advice everyone gives her is to stay away from Diane, but she persists to the point that a confrontation ends with Diane slamming a skate blade into her forehead in order to frame Rachel and get her thrown out of the venue. That also allows her to lure Ethan away during halftime to ‘help’ his mother, but instead she locks him in a room so he can’t play and Alex will be seen by the scout. Rachel, however, is not going to go down without a fight, and Diane’s world may come crashing down when Alex finally realizes that she just may be completely out of control.
Lifetime
The Hockey Mom’s Revenge is a pure popcorn flick, and while it is supposedly based on true events (plural is the key as the story may use basic facts from many different sources, totally embellished for entertainment purposes) it’s hard to take much of it seriously. The Diane character is completely nuts, and it should be obvious to anyone who interacts with her that none of her attempts to be sincere are real. Her fake concern, her fake smile, everything about her outward behavior is fake, but inwardly she is obsessively driven to do what she thinks is best for her son … but she is truly only thinking of herself. She is using Alex to attain what she felt she was owed, because being thrown off of her team when she was a child completely ended any chances she had of turning pro (I am today years old learning there is a Professional Women’s Hockey League). Clara Davies’ script really does a great job of making Diane dangerously unhinged, but keeping all of that hidden behind a facade of supportive hockey mom. Davies also does a nice job of making Rachel sympathetic, and both Ethan and Alex are written as average teens who enjoy hockey and blowing off steam with their friends at the bowling alley, neither of them teetering into delinquent territory despite Alex being quite aware that his mother is always watching him, sniffing him for alcohol and weed when he comes home, Alex fearful of even revealing he has a girlfriend because Diane does not allow him to date during the season. Coach Mike is already at the end of his rope with Diane when the story starts, humoring her that he will read the pages of notes she’s emailing him with her thoughts on how the team should be guided. Perhaps assistant coach Carl is a bit out of place as he seems utterly clueless about how to even begin coaching, and even more befuddled when Diane tells him about the booze and then switches things up on him when he’s telling Rachel about it, suddenly on her side against a two week suspension — which is the end of the season — only suggesting Ethan not being allowed to play the next to last game (when the scout will be there). That is really what sets off Rachel’s alarm bells, and then she realizes Diane knew the scout would be there. The scene where she confronts Diane and slaps a cupcake out of her hand is gold … because by that time we’ve all been willing Rachel to haul off and slap Diane across the face. The cupcake slap was just as satisfying as it came out of nowhere and was so aggressive for Rachel, clearly at the end of her rope as well. Nothing in the story can really be taken all that seriously, but it’s written well enough that it holds your interest. There are a couple of quibbles that really add to the goofiness of the story. For a large part of the movie, Diane is always lurking around the ice rink after hours with no explanation as to why she has access to the building, or how. It is finally revealed late in the story that she has keys because she’s always handling the fundraisers and is the biggest donor to the team but it’s frustrating to not know this earlier. Then there is the Zamboni incident. Diane somehow knows all the inner workings of the machine to the point that she can cut the brake fluid tube, but that in no way explains how Coach Mike was so violently ejected when it hit the wall. Zambonis go a top speed of TEN mph! It’s such an absurd moment you can’t help but laugh, but it just contributes to how over-the-top this movie actually is. If there is a missed opportunity here, it’s that the character of Rachel isn’t the girl young Diane assaulted in the prologue. That may have helped explain some of her unease around Diane throughout the movie, and it would have really given her some ammo during their confrontation, to throw in Diane’s face how deranged and violent she was as a child. The movie holds your attention, but adding this layer of familiarity between Diane and Rachel — and Rachel could have eventually revealed to Michelle and Ethan her past with Diane — could have really upped the stakes. Director Travis Milloy does a great job of guiding the cast through their scenes, allowing Kate Dailey to gleefully chew the scenery, while keeping the whole thing from tipping over into parody.
Lifetime
Dailey is terrific as Diane. She manages to seem like a normal mom at first, always supporting her son at every practice and game, but it becomes clear the first time we see her talking to Rachel and Michelle that she’s putting on a front. The way she speaks to them, or Coach Mike, carries a tone of insincerity. Her smiles are loaded with contempt for whoever they are directed at. Diane lives in Diane’s World and everyone else is just visiting. Dailey brings all of Diane’s villainy just below the surface, not overt until the climax, but enough to make Diane a very unsettling character for the viewers and the other characters as well. Dailey has appeared in at least three other Lifetime movies this past year, but this is the first that really puts her front and center, giving her a character she can really sink her teeth in to, proving that she is leading lady material. Also really wonderful is Molly Ryman as Rachel, imbuing the character with warmth, doing all she can to shield her son from the realities of their financial situation. Whenever she is around Diane, she becomes a bit more nervous and closed off, using her body language to show her discomfort while alway trying to keep a smile on her face. It’s because of this performance that it really seems like Rachel was a childhood victim of Diane, constantly having her guard up, not knowing when Diane could snap next. However, Ryman still makes Rachel the character the audience can identify with and root for, making us always on the edge of our seats, wishing and hoping she will finally break and haul off on Diane. Both actresses play off of each other extremely well, making the whole story all the more watchable.
Luke Shelton and Luke Pfluger, as Alex and Ethan, respectively, are also terrific. Both do a great job at making the characters feel like they’ve known each other for years, and they show that they also have a respect for each other when it comes to the game. Shelton’s Alex is a bit more on edge because of his mother, and it’s nice that he gets to have a ‘Mom, what did you do’ moment during the climax. If IMDb is to be believed, this is Pfluger’s first credited role and he is wonderful. He has a natural rapport with Ryman, making them feel like mother and son (and kudos to the casting department because these two look like they could be related), he gives Ethan an understanding of their situation and doesn’t hold their financial state against her, always willing to help by getting a job even though she refuses. He makes Ethan such a good kid that you really feel for him when Diane starts setting him up to fail. Both actors are excellent and work well with each other, Dailey and Ryman. Mark Justice gets to show a very different side of his talents as Coach Mike. The last time we saw him on Lifetime, he was a very imposing and dangerous figure in Murder at the Lighthouse, and now he gets to be a more grounded coach who works with teenagers, keeping their best interests in mind. He clearly shows how harried Mike is right from his first encounter with Diane, but he does his best to humor her. It’s unfortunate that he’s taken out so early by the Zamboni because it would have been interesting to see Diane go up against both him and Rachel … with whom he may also be having a secret relationship (which also plays into Diane’s derangement against Ethan and his mother) … but when he’s in the story he is doing a great job at telegraphing Mike’s weariness at having to constantly deal with Diane’s over-stepping of bounds.
The rest of the supporting cast all do some excellent work bringing their characters to life, playing the wildest of situations completely straight to prevent the story from becoming a farce. As it stands, The Hockey Mom’s Revenge is pure entertainment, something you can just settle onto the couch for with a bowl of popcorn, a charcuterie board, your favorite beverage, with your bestie, significant other, or even for a ‘girls night’. It may require some suspension of disbelief at times, but in the end it is wildly entertaining, buoyed by some truly terrific performances.
The Hockey Mom’s Revenge has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-PG.