Deceitful Dating

Not that they care, but this is it: I'm giving up on Lifetime. I've taken long breaks from their formulaic juvenile dime-a-dozen turkeys a few times over the years, and unfortunately they seem to be getting worse with each new 2021 movie. This one not only was slow and boring, but the title (Deceitful Dating) has nothing at all to do with the storyline. LMN seems to think its viewers are idiotic children - enticing them with such horribly lame, pandering titles and plots.

Or maybe it's the writers and producers who are the true idiots.

Good riddance, Lifetime garbage.

Grade F- / 1 out of 10 (would be 0 out of 10 if possible)

3 attractive/semi attractive women one married to him the other two totally into him made absolutely zero sense. Derek Hamiltons acting skills aren't even there. He looks and acts like a bumbling father who has this "I'm the rooster in the hen house" attitude. Alice seems helpless. Chelsea is a teenager who you'd like to punch. I didn't mind her. Being bad is sometimes a good thing. She was an ok character. The father is the major issue. What a tool. Old man sweaters. Old man walk. Just a total bore. Should've of killed him off with a heart attack and kept his wife alive to make a womens love triangle. That would've saved this mess.

The movie had a dark mood to it. Probably the filter used for filming, but it worked for the movie. There's no new ground covered here, but the writers played their cards close to the vest. Throughout the movie, you'll go back and forth btwn what you think may be going on, and you won't be surprised by the ending...but the movie got us there w/o the characters being too obtuse. This movie also makes the case for why people should TALK to each other. That much is clear throughout the movie, and some of what happens is the direct result of a lack of honest communication.

Didn't have a problem w/the title and it was ambiguous enough to not give anything away. Unlike "Engaged to a Psycho" or "Murder in the Vineyard" that were complete misdirects. One problem Lifetime has with their good AND bad movies is that they skate around behaviors that for the most part normal people would react to or question. There are a few instances of this in the storyline, and for whatever reason, they can't properly tell the story w/o giving it away. So they ignore. "I see dead people" totally spoils the plot of The Sixth Sense and isn't a misdirect, but you go through the movie and don't realize it until the right moment (if you caught on early in the movie, kudos to you). This is what Lifetime needs to work on. Giving characters little to no personality or not having characters question things is not a replacement for natural human reactions nor does it create an atmosphere for the audience to really see if characters are capable of things. I won't name any specific examples because the one that bugs me the most is a spoiler.

One distracting thing was that Chelsea (oldest daughter) always had a puffy coat or thick sweater/sweatshirt on indoors compared to everyone else. Maybe the actress was really cold wherever they were, but in the context of the movie, it looked strange in certain scenes.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it and I would watch again if I needed background noise.

PS...some may think the movie dragged but Lifetime needs a balance of thrillers and the campy movies they mostly produce.

Logan (Derek Hamilton) is a struggling single dad to two girls, Chelsea (Karis Cameron) and Sophie, after recently losing his wife six months earlier. Alice King (Christine Chatelain) is the intriguing new neighbor. As she gets closer to Logan, Chelsea and family friend Jillian get more suspicious. And then the police informs them that her ex-husband suddenly turns up dead.

The ex-husband story should come in a lot sooner. Alice is not suspicious enough for too long. Maybe the angry ex-husband can show up at the door. There needs to be more back and forth. This Lifetime movie is doing a very slow boiling drama. It's too slow for too long.

Watching this movie on Lifetime Movie Network, I finally realized why these LMN movies are mediocre at best: there are so many commercials that the effective running time of the movie is maybe an hour to an hour and ten minutes, so there's no time to develop a plot. Thus, things happen so quickly that it's hard to see how parts of the plot work together.

Early in the movie, Chelsea, the oldest daughter, laments to both Alice (the dad's new love interest) and Jillian (her late mom's best friend) that her boyfriend Derrick has been cheating on her with her best friend, Rose. Both Alice and Jillian tell Chelsea not to take it. Then, in the next scene, Rose - who has never been shown before in the movie, so the viewer doesn't know who she is - gets mugged. We learn who she is in the next scene, when Chelsea visits her in the hospital. Rose mentions she thinks her attacker was a woman because she was short and had long dark hair. That immediately makes the viewer realize the villain has to be either Alice or Jillian!

Chelsea does all this sleuthing to find out Alice isn't who she said she is (but there's a reason). We also find out Alice's ex-husbabd is murdered. Yet the murder is yet another disparate part of the plot - there is no scene, or appearance of the ex-husband; the viewer is simply told.

Chelsea continues her amateur detective work, finds the true villain, gets pursued by her, until a freak accident occurs which kills the villain cold, just as the father and the other woman come to Chelsea. The movie then has a cold end.

Lame-O.