Lifetime
Lifetime has left the ‘Voices of Lifetime’ series of films, moving on to its latest thriller that also isn’t a ‘Ripped from the Headlines’ story. Trapped in the Spotlight instead takes its cue from the 1981 thriller The Fan, about an obsessed fan who begins stalking his idol and her family, which is forgotten by most people today but has its devoted cult following.
Trapped in the Spotlight has a similar type of premise that centers around the R&B duo Lucious, made up of Lupita and Neveah. In the middle of a concert — a concert that has an intermission? — Lupita decides to quit the group because Neveah is backstage drinking and carrying on with a man when they need to go back on stage. The news of the break-up hits the gossip rags a minute later (!) and that’s how Neveah finds out it’s all over. Fifteen years later, Neveah is about to lose her apartment so she hits the bricks and tries to get a new contract as a solo artist with a record label. Exec Quinten tells her she’s unsignable because of her past — it’s been fifteen years dude, give a girl a break — but she later receives a call from him saying he’s had a change of heart. When she gets back to the office, everyone is gone except for a man named Izaak who tells her that he can give her career back … if she reteams with Lupita to complete the album they were about to release fifteen years earlier, writing three new songs in three days before what would have been the fifteenth anniversary of the album’s release. Neveah, still holding a grudge against Lupita for taking everything away from her, refuses but Izaak won’t take no for an answer. He chloroforms her, and when she wakes up she’s in a recording studio … with Lupita.
Izaak enters the room, which is a room built inside of a larger room, and reveals his plan — finish the album and they can go, but he still wants to work with Neveah on her solo career. The two women refuse but after he handcuffs them together and shackles their feet (the visual not being lost on Lupita), they finally bang out a song and record it (the two apparently play all of the instruments as well, at one point we see Lupita on the drums!). Lupita’s husband and daughter believe she’s at a business conference (she left the music industry after the end of Lucious), but her daughter Simone finds the song online on the official Lucious website … except there is no official Lucious website. The song instantly begins trending (it’s actually a good song), and now they only have two more to go. Knowing they now have an audience. Neveah and Lupita decide to get clever with the next song and hide a message in it, with the drum beat signaling an S-O-S, while hiding their location in the lyrics. Meanwhile, Lupita’s husband Marcel pays an unannounced visit to the group’s former manager Lenny and he admits that what is happening now is his son’s doing, so Marcel drags Lenny to the warehouse location that Lenny owns, knowing that’s where Izaak has taken them because of the recording studio inside. The women have also figured out who Izaak is and try to reason with him, but he knows more about them and the reasons for their break-up than they know, and once he reveals the truth behind what happened fifteen years earlier, Neveah begins to feel that Lupita and Marcel totally screwed her, to the point that she seems to be turning to Izaak’s side, putting Lupita’s life (as well as the lives of Marcel and Lenny when they arrive) in danger. But is it all a ruse to make Izaak feel comfortable, or is Neveah ready to get her own revenge for being so wronged?
Lifetime
Trapped in the Spotlight turns out to be a much better thriller than expected. The story, which requires some suspension of disbelief, works quite well once Neveah and Lupita are brought together again and the layers of their relationship are slowly peeled back to reveal the truth behind the break-up. And while it does stretch credulity that Neveah and Lupita can write, record and produce two songs in two days, the songs are actually so good you can forgive this bit of fantasy. The movie also works because of the performances of Monique Coleman (who also executive produced), Melyssa Ford and Emmanuel Kabongo, who share the bulk of the movie’s running time together. Coleman and Ford have a great bond and we believe they were once friends who have this serious rift between them, with Lupita trying to convince Neveah that she made the decision to save Neveah from herself (one flashback shows Neveah unconscious in a restroom with Lupita desperately performing CPR to save her life). The use of flashbacks to reveal the true nature of the break-up makes the story even more interesting. It begins to get a bit goofy by the film’s climax, but it’s not enough to mar what is a pretty solid thriller.
Coleman is excellent as Neveah, showing us her complete range of emotions as she has to confront her past with Lupita. Ford is also very good as Lupita, at first confrontational with Neveah but eventually trying to tell her that everything she did was for Neveah’s best interest. It’s not clear if Ford does her own singing, but Coleman — who does sing — does not provide her own singing voice (which is performed by a singer named Kira). While the songs are actually pretty good, the post-production lip sync is not totally up to snuff, making it obvious that the actresses are not singing live at times. Emmanuel Kabongo plays the character of Izaak close to the vest. He only reveals enough to the women, and makes subtle threats, to get them to comply. He delivers most of his dialogue in a calm, quiet manner, but he can lash out if he’s crossed. He manages to make Izaak cold as ice but someone who seems to have a real sense of danger just boiling under the surface.
Romaine Waite is fine as Marcel, and Glen Michael Scott also shows a bit of a sinister side to Lenny, although he plays Lenny’s knowledge of what Izaak is doing as something that needed to be done. His ‘oh well’ attitude is a bit baffling. Eden Cupid gets to shine in her few moments of screen time as Simone, and Sammy Jo Higgins gets a few (unintentional?) chuckles as she somehow, casually hears the secret code in the second song, ‘Angel Shot’ (she also has to explain to Simone what an ‘angel shot’ is, which is also a big clue that something is terribly wrong).
The Trapped in the Spotlight script is pretty solid overall, as is the directing by Nicole G. Leier, the performances are strong and the music is actually good enough to be released. The movie ends up being an unexpectedly effective thriller worth a watch.
Trapped in the Spotlight has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.
Sneak Peek | Trapped In The Spotlight
Lifetime