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LMN serves up another thriller as part of its ‘Twisted Fate’ theme, What Would You Kill For?, but this one commits all kinds of egregious sins that will have you screaming at the TV. Beware, there will be spoilers ahead because there is no way to discuss this movie without revealing some of the wild plot twists.
The story is all over the place but it boils down to a divorced couple who each have a stake in their restaurant. Min (Rayisa Kondracki) owns 51% of this company (I couldn’t resist the Dynasty reference), and ex-husband Rick (James Gilbert) has 49%. Min’s legal expert/realtor/friend/love interest (?) Ben (Steve Byers) has had a survey done of the property and discovered there are major structural issues with the building and it’s in her best interest to sell — to him. At dinner — in the restaurant that is about to fall down — Min, Ben, her (adopted) daughter Rosie (Laura Provenzano), and her lawyer/bestie Becky (Amanda Martínez) are celebrating Min’s signing of a deal to sell the property to Ben … but Rick shows up and warns Min not to sign the contract. For some reason Min had decided during dinner to go outside and prune some shrubs, and to anyone watching this movie it seemed like the restaurant was closed for the night, so it was a surprise when she went back in to join her party. Rick showed up again, this time with girlfriend/wife (?) Emma (Tara Yelland) in tow, warning her not to sign … but she literally just put her name on the dotted line so it’s too late. (Rick also drops a line about Ben hitting him, again, but at this point we’ve not seen the two have any previous interaction.)
The next morning Min gets a text from Rick to meet him at the restaurant, and instead of saying no or just ignoring the text — because there’s nothing she could do at this point to change the sale — she goes and finds Rick dead in the refrigerator. The police and Emma arrive and — surprise! — Emma is also the town’s medical examiner so she has to pronounce Rick dead on the spot. Of course it looks like Min killed him because Emma claims Rick got a text from her asking to meet at the restaurant. Min can prove she got a text from him but … it’s vanished! Emma never shows Min or the police Rick’s texts, and the detective (Jim Codrington) says that these new text apps can make texts disappear (maybe they were using WhatsApp). More and more suspicious evidence begins to mount against Min, and in the midst of all this she also has Rosie to deal with because she is about to turn sixteen. Every year Rosie gets a birthday card from her birth mother and suddenly for her sixteenth the message in the card says that this will be the end of their communication. Which is even more sus because not long before this when Rosie said she wanted to find her birth mother, Min pointed out that there were never return addresses on the envelopes so maybe she didn’t want to be found. This confirms it … but was Min sending the cards the entire time? And then someone with large feet lets themselves into Min’s house (the same way they let themselves into the restaurant to kill Rick) and the only thing taken is the box of birthday cards, which were in a box in the back of Rosie closet. Who would even know they were there and why would they steal just those cards? Things get more convoluted as Min has Becky review the survey of the building and finds out it was faked, which now puts her trust in Ben on the line because now it seems like he bilked her out of the property. A shocking discovery is made as the restaurant is being demolished that affects Ben deeply, and all kinds of crazy secrets are revealed, one of which puts Rosie in grave danger but the police show up out of nowhere and save the day. This is truly a WTF movie.
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What Would You Kill For? is full of head-scratching moments, at times making it feel like they either didn’t have time to film some important scenes, or those scenes were edited out for time. It’s also filled with performances that are blatantly telegraphing to the viewer that these characters are suspicious, the worst offender being Tara Yelland. At first she seems desperate to keep Rick from doing anything that would alienate her from Rosie, but from the moment she shows up at the restaurant to declare Rick dead, her performance is just basically a series of weird glances and behavior that is nothing but a giant red flag that would suggest to anyone paying attention that (a) she killed Rick for financial gain or (b) she helped Rick fake his death and he’s been the one lurking around the entire time. And since she’s the medical examiner, Helen Keller could tell you where all this is going. Also playing the ‘I’m acting guilty of something’ card is Steve Byers because Ben actually did benefit from having Rick out of the way. But he’s got more secrets that just makes the story even crazier (and sorry if this is rude to ask — why does Steve’s face look like shiny plastic through the entire movie?).
Rayisa Kondracki’s performance as Min is fine but the screenplay does her no favors, always putting her in the wrong place at the wrong time, always making her the suspect with no way to prove her innocence. James Gilbert plays Rick appropriately sinister, Laura Provenzano is good as another almost-rebellious teen (following her recent performance in The Perfect Killer, and Amanda Martínez actually comes off the best as Min’s voice of reason, but then she’s made to do something stupid like go to the cabin by herself to confront whoever is the killer … and somehow expecting that she’d just be able to walk away? Making a smart character do something dumb as a plot device is just bad writing.
Grace Knight’s script is just all over the place. After every commercial break there’s a new twist to the story and things just go completely haywire in the last act after Becky has an idea that the killer might be hiding out at Rick’s old cabin (while never thinking it might be Rick) and ends up getting stabbed in the shoulder — not typically a life-threatening injury but, yeah, poor Becky expires just as Min and Ben arrive, her last breath a gurgle. At this point, Emma has also lured Rosie to her house where she discovers the truth about her father and the birthday cards and her biological mother, but now she’s knows too much and her life is in danger but mom and Ben show up in time and just as you the viewer shouts at the TV, ‘someone call the police’ … the police show up without explanation (though not with the one detective who’s been giving Min the side-eye the entire movie). This whole movie is nuts. It’s bad but with a group of friends and a few cocktails, you could make a party out of it. Sean Cisterna directs what’s on the page, but you have to wonder if some of those pages were missing from the shooting script. The real question is why was the title changed for the LMN broadcast? Since Rick ‘died’ from ingesting food laced with cyanide, the original title makes a lot more sense: Flavor of Death.
What Would You Kill For has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.