"The Wrong Car" is an item in Lifetime's latest cycle — "The Wrong _____," as opposed to "The Perfect _____," "The _____ S/he Met Online," or "_____ at 17." It was shot under the working title "Black Car" — a cleverer name because it was a pun on both the literal and colloquial meanings of the word "black" — but someone either at the production companies, Moody Independent and Marvista Entertainment, or at Lifetime itself wanted the phrase "The Wrong
" to be in the title to key it in with others in the cycle. "The Wrong Car" was an auteur work given that it was written, directed and edited by the same person, John Stimpson, and for its first third it's actually a quite good suspense thriller revolving (almost inevitably) around the Uber ride-sharing service — or "NetCar," as Stimpson calls it. The central character is Trudy O'Donnell (Danielle Savre), a law student who had a bad breakup with a boyfriend two years earlier but only briefly mentions it, nor do we see him. In the opening scene she gets a ride home from a NetCar being driven by Charles (Kevin G. Cox), an O.K.-looking but rather nerdish guy who wants to date her, but she's not interested in him that way and politely turns him down. On a later evening she lets her roommate Gretchen Healey (Francia Raisa) talk her into going to a club; Gretchen drove her there but Trudy decides to bail in mid-evening and hails a NetCar
only this NetCar driver turns out to be a phony: he's a serial rapist who poses as a NetCar driver, picks up hot-looking women outside clubs, gives them water from a bottle he's injected with the "date-rape drug" Rohypnol, then takes them to a motel whose desk clerk, Roger (Rhet Kidd), is in on the plot, and rapes them while they're too stoned to resist. This happens to Trudy, who wakes up in the motel with only the dimmest notion of how she got there, and her memories of the evening, such as they are, are fragmentary and feature an apparent hallucination involving a guy looking like Chucky hovering over the proceedings.
She goes through a humiliating five-hour rape exam at the hands of the police, who confirm that she was drugged but are unable to match the DNA of the semen inside her to anything in a law-enforcement database (they find bits of latex, indicating that the rapist wore a condom but it broke), and they give her a supply of the morning-after pill and a referral to an HIV testing service. Trudy's case is assigned to a young African-American detective named Jackson (Christina Elmore) — we're not told her first name — but Trudy gets frustrated at the slow pace of Jackson's investigation and decides to take matters into her own hands. She asks her classroom friend Charles for information on NetCar and uses it to sign on as a driver herself in hopes of tracing and catching her rapist. Among her first NetCar clients is an investment broker named Donovan (Jackson Davis), whom we're immediately suspicious of because he's nice-looking and in Lifetime's iconography nice-looking men are almost always villains. About one-third of the way through the movie Trudy picks up as NetCar fares Carlos (Walley Walkker) and Juan (Jesse Gabbard), two Latino gangbangers who put their guns in Trudy's face and demand first that she give them a five-star customer rating, then pick up a wounded comrade at the other end of town and take him to a secret doctor who will patch him up and extract the bullet without reporting it to the police. It's at this point that "The Wrong Car" changes from a pretty good suspense tale to a particularly rancid piece of Lifetime cheese, as virtually nothing in the rest of Stimpson's script makes a lick of sense. It's just one weird plot twist after another. Stimpson has real flair as a director, both in creating atmosphere and getting good performances out of his leads (Danielle Sayre is utterly convincing as the avenging angel out not only to catch her own rapist but get the guy off the street before he victimizes anyone else, and I also quite liked Rhet Kidd as the sleazy desk clerk), but maybe he'll be better off if he sticks to directing movies based on scripts he hasn't written!
She goes through a humiliating five-hour rape exam at the hands of the police, who confirm that she was drugged but are unable to match the DNA of the semen inside her to anything in a law-enforcement database (they find bits of latex, indicating that the rapist wore a condom but it broke), and they give her a supply of the morning-after pill and a referral to an HIV testing service. Trudy's case is assigned to a young African-American detective named Jackson (Christina Elmore) — we're not told her first name — but Trudy gets frustrated at the slow pace of Jackson's investigation and decides to take matters into her own hands. She asks her classroom friend Charles for information on NetCar and uses it to sign on as a driver herself in hopes of tracing and catching her rapist. Among her first NetCar clients is an investment broker named Donovan (Jackson Davis), whom we're immediately suspicious of because he's nice-looking and in Lifetime's iconography nice-looking men are almost always villains. About one-third of the way through the movie Trudy picks up as NetCar fares Carlos (Walley Walkker) and Juan (Jesse Gabbard), two Latino gangbangers who put their guns in Trudy's face and demand first that she give them a five-star customer rating, then pick up a wounded comrade at the other end of town and take him to a secret doctor who will patch him up and extract the bullet without reporting it to the police. It's at this point that "The Wrong Car" changes from a pretty good suspense tale to a particularly rancid piece of Lifetime cheese, as virtually nothing in the rest of Stimpson's script makes a lick of sense. It's just one weird plot twist after another. Stimpson has real flair as a director, both in creating atmosphere and getting good performances out of his leads (Danielle Sayre is utterly convincing as the avenging angel out not only to catch her own rapist but get the guy off the street before he victimizes anyone else, and I also quite liked Rhet Kidd as the sleazy desk clerk), but maybe he'll be better off if he sticks to directing movies based on scripts he hasn't written!