The Wrong Crush (2017 TV Movie) User Reviews

The title makes no sense

[pumping_iron-1 · 5/10 · 30 July 2022]

This movie is fairly decent even though it left me with many unanswered questions. Amelia, a high school student, and her mother, a single parent, live in this big beautiful house and Amelia drives a Mercedes. There's no mention of whether Amelia's father is dead or alive. Her mother works in a nursing home. Do they have additional income. Amelia is heavy into field and track and plans to compete in the 400 meter. For a competitive athlete you'd think she'd know to wear a supportive sports bra to keep them from bouncing all over. I use to be a runner and that would be annoying to me. Amelia's mother is a piece of work. She's stuck in Amelia's past and can't see her for the wonderful woman she's growing into. Amelia is strong to be capable of continuing to clean up her life without her mother's trust and support. I didn't understand why neither the school principal nor the police could question the players on the football team to find out if Scott was selling them steroids. Did the school have such little trust in their students. Scott appeared to be a good student, and should have been given a chance. Were they so quick to judge him because he played in a band. What bigots. I would like to have seen the principal apologize to Scott for being so quick not to believe him. What was up with the nursing home where Amelia's mother worked. There appeared to be just two caregivers and they were always caring for Miss Wheeler. I saw other patients. Was Miss Wheeler the only patient requiring specialized care. The title was not at all descriptive of what this movie was about. The acting was mediocre, with the Jake character being the worse. He was totally unbelievable.

Average

[haroot_azarian · 4/10 · 4 June 2021]

I thought Victoria Konefal was superb in this and frankly Lesli Kay was mean right up to the end!

One of those films where I feel bad for the actors for having to deliver their lines

[flarefan-81906 · 3/10 · 13 May 2019]

This film's title is rather misleading, as the plot centers around a teenage girl named Amelia being framed for drug dealing. Amelia is particularly vulnerable to this frameup since she's a former addict.

It's a good plot concept for this sort of movie, allowing for dramatic exploration of the struggles faced by drug users even after they go clean, along with the usual heavy doses of mystery and romance. Unfortunately, the potential is dashed to the rocks by a flat, lifeless script which at times seems to be trying its hardest to make the viewer feel ambivalent about the characters.

The best example of this is the scene where Amelia's mother refuses to believe her. We should be able to sympathize with both characters here, especially after it comes up that Amelia has lied to her mother about being off drugs before. Indeed, given how Amelia's mother is used in the film's resolution, we're obviously meant to sympathize with both characters here. But the mom's dialogue is so viscous, senseless, and completely lacking in emotional warmth that only a sadist could sympathize with her. She all but cracks a satisfied smirk when her daughter breaks down into tears.

There's still enough B-movie drama in the actual plot to make this tolerable viewing. But it's not recommended viewing by any stretch of the imagination.

Bad Movie

[amgee-89551 · 1/10 · 10 October 2018]

Really boring Lifetime movie. The plot was stupid. The acting was quite poor.

Total dreck

[rdhoran · 2/10 · 6 September 2020]

I'm five minutes in and the grown up daughter sees a man in a hoodie stalking her on the property. She doesn't bother about it. Doesn't even give it a second thought.

Shortly after that, we see her mom supposedly working at a nursing home trying to spoon feed pureed peas to a resident. The resident is so healthy and alert that she could obviously feed herself and could've probably run the kitchen.

Then, a minute after that, the mother and daughter have an encounter about their poor communication. The mother tells the daughter she can't answer her cell phone because she works at a nursing home!

I now will have to answer the question as to whether my review contains spoilers. What a joke! Oh my goodness. How shall I answer?!?

I was distracted for a few minutes typing this, but I'm back watching this crapfest. Now there is an actress who is obviously 28 years old unhappy because she didn't break the national record in some track event in practice, and her supposed coach who looks to be exactly her age acting like he has no idea how to coach. I guess not being able to coach and not being able to act were prerequisites for the role.

I just got lucky! The program went on commercial break and I learned about Lysol, Doritos, TrueCar, Colonial Penn, and a bunch of dermatitis and incontinence products!

Oops, now back to the show where the main character is a now a complete wreck of an alcoholic who dared her friend to death and got put on probation for it!

I can't go on. It's time I do something better than watch this, like drill my own teeth.

One of the better Wrong --- movies

[phd_travel · 7/10 · 12 August 2017]

This Lifetime thriller is a little less cheesy than some of the other similar movies. The teenage heroine is flawed an ex alcoholic trying to make her life better by track and field. She has a boyfriend but kind of bonds with a new kid but he turns out to be a psycho. A few years before her friend and her had been drinking and driving and she survived the crash but her friend didn't. Why the parents should blame her I don't get since their daughter was responsible for her own actions. Anyway things tie up quite neatly after some neat twists and turns. The actress Victoria Konefal is quite good and sweet looking. The dialog is more complex and less clichéd than usual.

One of the worst "Wrong" Movies

[aprilsfriendorin · 2/10 · 28 June 2020]

If you've seen any of the Lifetime "Wrong" movies, you know you can't expect much- they all follow a pretty predictable format. However, this one is exceptionally bad because the characters just aren't interesting. Moreover, there's no solid reasoning behind the "bad guy's" obsession. It attempts to be deep but it really isn't, and the foundation it builds itself on (the protagonists's backstory) isn't explored deeply enough to make the audience care.

Good

[miag-17209 · 8/10 · 29 March 2021]

I LIKED IT BECAUSE IT WAS A GOOD TV MOVIE NOT OVERLY DRAWN-OUT STRAIGHT TO THE POINT BUT A LITTLE MYSTERY 👍🏽 IT WAS JUST AS A TV MOVIE SHOULD BE.

Emotional complexity makes this an unusually good Lifetime thriller

[mgconlan-1 · 8/10 · 3 July 2017]

The omens for "The Wrong Crush" weren't good: it was another production of the folks at Hybrid LLC, who've also given us "Wrong _____" series films like "The Wrong House" and "The Wrong Roommate" (which, like "The Wrong Crush," was directed by David DeCoteau from a script by Matthew Jason Walsh, though the original story for "The Wrong Crush" came from co-producers Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, who also wrote the original story for the recently aired and unimpressive "The Wrong House"), and the plot line followed familiar Lifetime clichés. The central character is a teenage girl named Amelia Cross (Victoria Konefal), who in the opening scene is shown on a hospital gurney being wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery following a car accident. Just before they put her under she babbles incoherently about a friend named Joy who was in the car with her when it crashed, and the hospital workers' silence about Joy's fate let both Amelia and us know that she was killed in the crash. Then there's a chyron title reading, "Two Years Later." Amelia has re- established herself at the local high school. In a series of flashbacks intercut with the main action we realize that Amelia had a serious problem with alcoholism and drug abuse, to the point where she not only continually lied to her mom Tracy (a nicely hard-edged performance by Lesli Kay) but once actually assaulted mom with a bottle. Joy's death shocked Amelia into getting clean and sober, but Tracy still mistrusts Amelia and regularly works double shifts at a nursing home rather than have to confront Amelia at home.

One day Amelia and her friend Lauren (Natalie Haro) meet a hot new guy on campus, Jake Jarrico (Ricardo Hoyos); Lauren immediately has the hots for him but he's only interested in cruising Amelia, who begs off on the ground that she already has a boyfriend. Amelia is still being haunted by her guilt feelings over Joy's death — and she's also being hounded by Joy's parents (Jon Briddell and Meredith Thomas), who show up at her track practice and angrily chew her out, saying that they intend to do everything in their power to make her life miserable and keep her from getting the college track scholarship she's counting on because they blame her for Joy's death and will never forgive her. It turns out that Joy died because she and Amelia went out one night in Joy's mother's car, both drunk and stoned to the proverbial gills, and they made a dare that each would drive at night for 15 minutes without the car's headlights on. Joy went first and drove the car off the road into a ravine — Amelia, on the passenger's side, lucked out because her window was open and she was thrown clear, but Joy was killed in the ensuing crash. The plot turns when Jake breaks into the locker of Amelia's boyfriend Scott (Pedro Correa) and plants a large quantity of steroid pills therein, then calls in a tip to the school, leading to Scott's suspension and pending charges against him for dealing drugs. Then we get a cut-in scene in which Jake is shown inside an SUV being driven by Joy's father, and it turns out Jake isn't a high school student at all, but a 20-year- old private investigator Joy's father hired to get Amelia in trouble and get her probation revoked.

In summary, this doesn't sound different from the plots for a hundred other Lifetime movies, but where The Wrong Crush scores is in the peculiar emotional intensity of Matthew Jason Walsh's dialogue and the multidimensionality he brings to the characters (something we're not used to seeing in Lifetime movies, especially ones Christine Conradt didn't write). The scene between Amelia and her mom Tracy in which Scott's arrest on a set-up charge of drug possession with intent to sell convinces Tracy that Amelia has relapsed and is drinking and/or using again is particularly intense; one understands where both the characters are coming from and also gets a sense of tragedy that try as she might to be good and competent, Amelia can't escape her past or the damage she did during it. The characters are drawn as real people, not stick figures in a Lifetime thriller: Amelia is someone we're obviously supposed to like, and yet we get a sense of the tortured past she led and how it's come back to haunt her in the present, and just how flimsy her "recovery" is and how hard she continually has to work at it. (I've talked with people in 12-step programs and got the impression that the way the 12-step system constantly forces you to dwell on your substance-abusing past makes you feel like you're still an addict even if you're currently clean and sober.)

Scott seems like a decent boy but also a wretchedly unsupportive one, "reading" Amelia's confusion about their relationship as rejection and outright accusing her of cheating on him. Jake is a quirky character who's several cuts above Lifetime's usual villains: he's got his own tumbled past (he was thrown out of military school for beating up on his fellow students, though he made up a cock-and-bull story about being responsible for the death of his brother that got him into the support group Amelia was obliged under her probation terms to attend) and he becomes a real flesh-and-blood character in his yearnings, even though he's also despicable. "The Wrong Crush" builds a peculiar level of emotional intensity rare for a Lifetime movie — indeed, rare for any sort of movie in this weird age in which film directors and writers seem to want us to observe the characters as if they were lab rats and not get too emotionally connected with any of them — and manages to be both entertaining and deeply moving in a way that embraces the Lifetime clichés and yet transcends them.

***1/2

[edwagreen · 9/10 · 10 November 2017]

Well-acted drama where a girl, who was on drugs and drinking heavily, has turned her life around only to be victimized by revenge and a fellow student who has been hired by the parents of the girl who was killed in a car accident when our heroine was injured two years before.

Our heroine is on the verge of a college scholarship. A wonderful athlete, she has to contend with a mistrustful and alienated mother, and the parents of the girl who was killed in the accident. Though she has turned her life around, the group therapy psychologist claims that until she makes total peace with her mother, then and only then can she really move on with her life.

She has a boyfriend who becomes a little distant when she reveals her past to him. A new boy enters the picture and when the dead girl's parents realize they have made a mistake in hiring him to find out if she is violating her parole, all hell breaks loose when he kills the father and plants drugs in the high school locker of the boyfriend.

A wonderful film depicting redemption and ultimate victory over an adverse situation.

All Roads Lead to Sawyer Ravine

[lavatch · 8/10 · 14 March 2021]

One of our favorite actresses, Vivica A. Fox, plays the role of Gwen, the head of a nursing home. Gwen is the voice of wisdom to the troubled mom Tracy Cross, who has become nearly estranged from her daughter Amelia. The major undercurrent of the film is the healing process that takes place between mother and daughter.

In a tragic automobile accident, Tracy's daughter Amelia was in the passenger seat when her bestie Joy Hessler was driving under the influence. The car toppled into Sawyer Ravine, killing Joy and leaving Amelia seriously injured. While Amelia has fully recovered and has become a budding track star, her mother has never forgiven her for the period when she was drunken and disorderly.

Now, a young man named Jake Jerrico has become obsessed with Amelia. Much of the film's action is consumed with the dastardly deeds of Jake's "crush" on Amelia. But the antics of Jake are supplanted by the falling out that has occurred between Amelia and her mother.

It is tempting to fault the filmmakers for lack of credibility in the unusually cruel nature of Tracy's conduct towards her daughter. But there is payoff that comes with the most interesting character in the film in the figure of Mrs. Hessler, who never forgave Amelia for the death of her daughter Joy. Perhaps unfairly, Mrs. Hessler once said to Amelia, "You let her kill herself!!!" But the bereaved mom has now had a change of heart after her husband was killed by Jake, whom he hired to try to find evidence that Amelia had fallen off the wagon.

Another strength of the film was the way in which the support group was handled in the grief counseling session led by Dr. Griffin. But the most moving part of the film was the confessional of Mrs. Hester to Tracy, which gave Tracy a new outlook on her daughter.

All roads lead to Sawyer Ravine, where a very brief action scene leads to the exit of Jake Jerico from the screenplay. The denouement is exclusively devoted to the universal theme of the bonding of a mother and her daughter.

Shocker With A Surprise Ending

[robert23-1 · 10/10 · 19 July 2017]

I had the pleasure of watching this movie on YouTube last night and after watching it, I totally disagree with the current overall rating. This movie, was not predictable and definitely worth watching. What a thriller it was. I was most impressed with the lead actress who excelled in her role. But..... I was absolutely more impressed with the lead actor, Ricardo Hoyos, in the role of Jake. The casting was "spot on" and his performance was, to say the least absolutely outstanding! That we soon began to hate his character is a credit to his acting skills. This movie & his performance is not to be missed! An outstanding thriller!!

So bad but so good

[missraze · 9/10 · 25 June 2021]

At this point, since no one else seems to like these Wrong movies, I now think I just have a fetish for them. I am working through the entire series.

Yes. Series. An ongoing chronicles with a recurring theme? People seem to forget that this is a series. However, the writer(s) seem to be getting a teeny bit lazy. One point 15 minutes in, the two main female friends play fight over one of their phones and play an unusually long game of tug of war with the poor contraption and it flies out their hands in true bimbo fashion and slides across the dirt, landing coincidentally right at the foreshadowed killer's feet.

ACTUAL line from the movie:

(Obvious future victim): So do you just stand around waiting for phones to fly out of someone's hands so it can land at your feet and give you an excuse to talk to them?

It's almost or literally as if the writer knows how poor the scene was and can't develop the plot any other way, and now has to justify the stupidity.

HOWEVER. As banal as it was, I still for some reason love these movies. I think I enjoy the drama and the theme including its light hearted approach and the setting. It's absent minded entertainment.

There was a plot twist here that was more of the better ones in the series, yet the build up was ironically one of the worse ones. Also there was a scene that was deliberately or rather blatantly edited in OUT of order.

The victim was running track and then the police come and arrest her boyfriend for something they think she was apart of. Then the next scene she's all dolled up, walking into class not detained or interrogated and not looking like she ran track at all, and sits down in her seat not looking stressed at all, the actress herself is literally forcing casualty in this scene because she doesn't notice her stalker who suddenly appears in class. Then the next scene they continue the investigation scene in jail with her boyfriend... WTF. Then a couple scenes later she finally here in touch with her boyfriend meaning for the passed couple of scenes they never acknowledged his arrest or her involvement. Just no.

Also the stalker is clearly Canadian due to his accent and he's trying to sound like a cool American and it's annoying. The mic is up too high on his voice and it makes his attempt at seductive whispers sound loud and forced and cringey because I can hear the words forming in the back of his throat. Not sexy.

Last thing: The house is incredibly large and lavish for a single mom forced to work double shifts at a quaint nursing home.

Other than that, the movie is just fine for what it is, a TV movie in the Wrong series.