The first of Lifetime's "premiere" movies April 1 was one of the worst things I've ever seen on the network! Judging from the title, "Fatal Defense," I was expecting a story in which a woman defense attorney gets a man acquitted of a terrible crime, then realizes he's actually guilty and tries to nail him for something else, while of course he finds out and tries to kill her. No such luck: instead it was a story of a woman, Arden Walsh (Ashley Scott), terrorized by — get this: her martial-arts instructor. Arden is living in a nice suburban home and raising her eight-year-old daughter Emma (Sophie Guest) as a single parent — dad bailed on them for reasons that are never quite explained beyond that he liked to argue and she didn't (he was an attorney and after they broke up he married another lawyer, so Arden jokes that now he gets to argue all the time) — when a burglar in a ski mask breaks into her home when both she and the daughter are there. The burglar brandishes the sort of knife you'd use to cut fish open and take their guts out prior to cooking them, and threatens Arden with it — and Arden hears her sick daughter (she has a cold) asking for a glass of water and tells the burglar she'd better get the girl some water before she gets suspicious. Amazingly, director John Murlowski and writer Steven Palmer Peterson expect us to believe that a) the burglar buys this and lets Arden out of his sight, and b) once out of the burglar's direct control Arden does absolutely nothing (like call the police on her cell phone — this is 2017, after all, so she undoubtedly has one) to get help, while c) the daughter notices nothing wrong until the burglar leaves and Emma finds her mom strapped to a chair with duct tape.
Thinking she's actually giving Arden good advice, her sister Gwen (Laurie Fortier) advises her to take a self-defense class, and the instructor turns out to be a muscular hunk named Logan Chase (David Cade). Well, any veteran Lifetime watcher knows what that means: just about every reasonably attractive male in a Lifetime movie turns out to be a black-hearted psycho villain, and Logan is no exception. He runs his class with a visceral intensity and a line of verbal abuse a military drill sergeant might have regarded as too extreme, though instead of picking on Arden he seems to be taking a shine to her and we wonder if he's going to form a demented crush on her. Only the first time they're making eyes at each other and she seems willing to have sex with him, instead of responding as any normal straight male would he grabs her, turns her around and ties her hands behind her back, explaining later that the point of him doing this is to teach her never to let her guard down, no matter how safe she may feel. Later he actually ties her up, kidnaps her and throws her in the trunk of his car, then challenges her to figure out how to escape. Naturally on this one she does complain to the police, but the woman detective investigating the case says that because she signed a release form agreeing to be subjected to his "extreme" training methods, she really doesn't have a case against him — at least not one the authorities would be willing to prosecute. It goes on pretty much like that, with writer Peterson deploying one tired old Lifetime plot device after another to stretch out the running time to two hours. "Fatal Defense" was such a perfect assembly of Lifetime's most risible clichés it achieves a sort of demented perfection on its own, though it's so mind-numbingly predictable and so ineptly written and stage the likely reaction it's going to elicit from anyone is, "Why the hell am I watching this?"
Thinking she's actually giving Arden good advice, her sister Gwen (Laurie Fortier) advises her to take a self-defense class, and the instructor turns out to be a muscular hunk named Logan Chase (David Cade). Well, any veteran Lifetime watcher knows what that means: just about every reasonably attractive male in a Lifetime movie turns out to be a black-hearted psycho villain, and Logan is no exception. He runs his class with a visceral intensity and a line of verbal abuse a military drill sergeant might have regarded as too extreme, though instead of picking on Arden he seems to be taking a shine to her and we wonder if he's going to form a demented crush on her. Only the first time they're making eyes at each other and she seems willing to have sex with him, instead of responding as any normal straight male would he grabs her, turns her around and ties her hands behind her back, explaining later that the point of him doing this is to teach her never to let her guard down, no matter how safe she may feel. Later he actually ties her up, kidnaps her and throws her in the trunk of his car, then challenges her to figure out how to escape. Naturally on this one she does complain to the police, but the woman detective investigating the case says that because she signed a release form agreeing to be subjected to his "extreme" training methods, she really doesn't have a case against him — at least not one the authorities would be willing to prosecute. It goes on pretty much like that, with writer Peterson deploying one tired old Lifetime plot device after another to stretch out the running time to two hours. "Fatal Defense" was such a perfect assembly of Lifetime's most risible clichés it achieves a sort of demented perfection on its own, though it's so mind-numbingly predictable and so ineptly written and stage the likely reaction it's going to elicit from anyone is, "Why the hell am I watching this?"
