Lifetime Review: 'Trapped by My Sugar Daddy'

18-year-old aspiring designer Carly Bragg (Katie Kelly) is excited to learn that the beautiful mansion near her home has finally been sold. She's even more intrigued when she sees the new owner: 50-year-old businessman Kyle Smithford (James Hyde). Despite the significant age gap, Carly can't help but be drawn to Kyle as she and her interior designer mother Sarah (Tiffany Montgomery) are hired to renovate Kyle's new home. To her surprise, Kyle begins flirting with her and, after some trepidation, Carly pursues a relationship with the older man. Swept off her feet by his expensive gifts and loving words, Carly feels like she's living a fantasy.

But once her mother finds out about the secret affair, that fantasy becomes a nightmare. Estranged from her parents, Carly begins spending more time with Kyle and it's then that her older lover begins to change. No longer the charmer he was when she met him, Kyle starts controlling Carly's every move and keeping her isolated from her family. With Kyle's mansion slowly becoming a gilded prison for Carly, it's up to Sarah to save her daughter before it's too late to free her from Kyle's clutches.

Back in 2020, Lifetime released a movie entitled Her Deadly Sugar Daddy, which has a bit in common with this year's Trapped by My Sugar Daddy. Obviously, both have the term "sugar daddy" in their titles. Both focus on a young woman starting a relationship with an older man who turns out to have a dark side. Both have ties to production company Reel One Entertainment. Both are even directed by women with experience acting on Lifetime: Brooke Nevin directed Her Deadly Sugar Daddy while Lindsay Hartley directed Trapped by My Sugar Daddy. Unfortunately, these films also share in common a lot of the same mistakes. Dull pacing, idiotic characters, bouts of bad dialogue, and a subpar climax are among the errors of this Lifetime flick about a May-December romance gone bad.

Before the plot truly falls into a rut, it gets off to a slow start as Carly meets and eventually falls for Kyle. While Her Deadly Sugar Daddy's Anthony Glonz has all the seductive appeal of a sheet of sandpaper, James Hyde's Kyle Smithford is effectively charismatic when he's first romancing Carly. The problem is that Carly's feelings about a relationship with Kyle change on a dime. One moment, she seems uneasy about Kyle's flirting and doesn't think dating him is a good idea--something she tells Kyle after their dinner date. But after that, apparently coming back to her friend Mel's apartment to find she's out on her own date is enough motivation for Carly to charge full steam ahead with Kyle. Carly is similarly inconsistent when Kyle's aggressive side emerges. Despite clearly growing disillusioned by her whirlwind romance and afraid of her once dashing lover, Carly inexplicably continues pushing her family away and passes up all the opportunities she's given to get away from Kyle.

While the plot synopsis suggests that Carly is eventually made a captive of Kyle's (thus the original title of the film being Prisoner of Love), you never get the sense Carly couldn't easily escape his property if she decided to make a run for it. And with Kyle's manipulation tactics being so blatant and obvious, Carly looks positively daft for falling for them. With how rushed her attraction to Kyle is developed, it's hard to buy that Carly is so head over heels for the man that she's willing to brush aside all his red flags and is thus susceptible to Kyle's psychological abuse. Ironically, Katie Kelly's performance is also pretty uneven. While a lot of her line deliveries are incredibly stilted, she's at her best when Carly is at her emotional low points. Despite Carly's unbelievable descent from a well-adjusted girl to the vulnerable plaything of a rich psychopath, Kelly is still great depicting Carly's quiet despair as her life begins to fall apart around her.

When it comes to Tiffany Montgomery's Sarah Bragg, it's a real "like daughter, like mother" situation. While spending most of the movie's runtime as a loving and protective mother, Sarah's immediate reaction to finding out about Carly and Kyle doesn't speak to this. Rather than direct her anger at the grown man putting the moves on her barely-legal daughter, Sarah scolds Carly for the affair and even goads her daughter into moving out--thus pushing Carly further into Kyle's arms. During this whole fiasco, it almost feels like Sarah is more upset about Carly embarrassing her and costing her a paycheck than concerned about her daughter's well-being. But like Kelly, Montgomery gives a stellar emotional performance once Sarah's nasty victim-shaming streak ends and she returns to being a loving mother as she desperately tries to rescue her daughter from an abusive man.

Even with her poor initial response to Carly's situation, Sarah handles the predicament much better than her husband Michael, who is ridiculously passive about his daughter being seduced by a man who is driving a wedge between her and her mother. Even when he claims he'll be the first one to beat Kyle up if he hurts his little girl, Michael doesn't seem too interested in actually making sure Carly is safe. In fact, the script could've easily been rewritten to have Sarah be a single mother and nothing much would change. Michael spends most of the movie either doing nothing or trotting after Sarah while she actually puts some effort into trying to save their daughter. Michael Wagemann can't do too much with such an indolent character while his Tracking a Killer co-star Ashton Leigh is even more wasted as Sarah's requisite co-worker/bestie Joanie, who barely gets any screentime and contributes nothing to the story. Surprisingly enough, Lindsay Hartley herself and Derek Kenney also hop aboard the Underutilization Express as Amanda James and her son Billy.

Between Amanda's status as Sarah's ruthless rival and the general air of creepiness both she and her son give off, their roles in the story could've been greatly expanded upon. Instead, apart from one minor connection linking them to the main drama, they're basically throwaway characters and Hartley's snarky performance is left to languish. Carly's best friend Mel fares much better than Joanie, with Heather Lynn Morris clearly having fun in the first half as Mel proves to be as party-obsessed and boy-crazy as they come. At the same time, Mel's ditzy encouragement of Carly and Kyle's inappropriate relationship does make it feel a little hypocritical for her to get mad at Carly for being too in love with Kyle to see how suspicious he is. Still, it's cool to see a horrific incident at Kyle's house snap Mel to her senses and turn her from vapid party girl to Genre Savvy girl--even if she does use that self-awareness to snap at Carly rather than convince her she needs to cut ties with her obviously dangerous boyfriend.

Lastly, we have the villains of this Lifetime feature: Hyde as Kyle Smithford and Ryan Francis as his buddy/partner-in-crime Brent Cundey. As I said before, Hyde does fine work selling Kyle as a suave Casanova in the film's first act. From his sweet-with-a-touch-of-awkward demeanor to his gushing compliments, Hyde gives Kyle's charming façade authenticity. Francis gives just as good a performance as Brent, the "bad boy" to Kyle's "romantic gentleman" who just as believably woos Mel before she wises up to the truth. However, once the truth about the men comes out, Kyle and Brent start to transform from authentically deceptive antagonists to unsubtle madmen with dialogue to match. SPOILER ALERT This comes to a head during the climax where Kyle and especially Brent really start acting like cartoon bad guys. It's especially laughable when the pair makes the cardinal villain mistake of stopping to brag/explain their plan to their victims, giving Sarah just enough time to come speeding in to save the day. Spoilers Over

While most of the cast does a good job, they're all hindered by the characters they're playing being badly written and/or poorly utilized. As such, there's not much they can do to counteract the inactive plot progression. A good amount of time is spent on the buildup to Carly and Kyle's relationship, followed by some more boring buildup to Kyle's true colors coming to light. It says something about this movie's thrill supply that initially, the worst thing that Kyle does to Carly is leave her alone for hours in his swanky mansion (I know, what a monster). Like Her Deadly Sugar Daddy, the main issue with Trapped by My Sugar Daddy is that it's a sluggish "thriller" with a clumsy story and a relatively unsympathetic protagonist. As such, it only makes sense that both movies earn the same odd-numbered score.

Score: 3 out of 10 IPA Drafts.