DEADLY MILE HIGH CLUB: DTMWaGL #24

They just let any old thing be deadly these days

Hello friends! Now, you already know that spas, isolation, and Hollywood obsessions can be deadly. But did you know that the mile high club can be deadly too? Of course it can! Everything can be deadly, in a Lifetime movie. I’m a year out, tops, from covering DEADLY UHHHH RABBIT I GUESS (TITLE TKTKTK). Nobody famous in this one, sorry, but content warnings for plane crashes, stalking, kidnapping, and discussion of suicide.

We open with a very quick scene of a man and woman, Jake and Tanya, flying and then crashing a small plane during a thunderstorm. The woman wakes up, badly injured, in a hospital, only to learn that her copilot didn’t make it. She cries, but then it’s over and “[upbeat music]” plays as a young handsome-ish white guy escapes his horrible shrew of a boss and goes to his first class at a flight school. His instructor is Tanya, all healed up and ready to get back to nor— what’s that? This young handsome-ish guy is also named Jake? Oh boy! Tanya takes an instant shine to Live Jake, promising him that he can be a pilot even though it seems like, really hard. After class, in her unreasonably gigantic home, Tanya looks at pictures of Dead Jake and cries, and then flips between pictures of Dead Jake and Live Jake and decides that her Jake has come back to her. I find it difficult to believe that she has not met a single other person named Jake in her whole life. I personally have known several Jakes. I haven’t crashed a plane and killed any of them though. Yet.

At Live Jake’s house, his wife Annie whines about how she wants to take a vacation to Hawaii because she’s sick of working on her dissertation. What’s her dissertation about? It could not possibly matter less to the plot of this movie. Jake tells her they can’t really afford that right now. Then Jake’s terrible boss Margaret barges in because she’s also Annie’s terrible mom, and she harangues Jake for leaving work early, how can she pitch him as the next head of the company to The Investors if he’s going to pull shit like this? Jake wearily tells her that his work was done, and that he was taking flying lessons. Margaret cackles, according to the closed captions, and says, “don’t you have to be smart to do that?” because she has recently arrived on this plane of existence from a different one, whose Prime Directive is “Jake is the worst piece of shit who has ever existed and we must destroy him emotionally.” It is exhausting! Margaret slips her daughter a check for $2,000 and leaves, having undermined her son-in-law in every way she can think of without securing earthmoving equipment. Later, Annie asks Jake why they don’t have money to go to Hawaii but he has money for flying lessons, which is valid. He knows it’s expensive but it’s a thing he’s always wanted to do, maybe one day he could even have his own small plane. Annie scoffs at this; it’s not that she agrees with her mother about everything, it’s just that she thinks he’s stupid and he doesn’t have the self-discipline to be a pilot. Jake doesn’t think he should have to sleep with Annie’s mom as well as work for her, so he goes to sleep on the couch.

Tanya leads Jake through a flight simulation and ogles him, until he crashes the simulated flight. That’s fine! After class, she assures him that he’s doing fine and offers to take him on a quick flight to Palm Springs, she uhhhh has a delivery to make? To Mr. Realname at 123 Fake Street? They go up in a pretty little plane and then get to know each other over dinner. Jake tells Tanya he’s been married for six years, and Tanya says that his wife must be excited about his taking flying lessons. You’d be surprised! Tanya has to confess something: there was no delivery, and she couldn’t take her eyes off Jake the first time she saw him, she just needed to spend time with him. In fact, there’s a hotel around the corner, they could spend time together there. Jake says he has to get home to his wife, who hates him, and actually, you know what, yes let’s go to that hotel. In the hotel, they kiss and it honestly looks unpleasant, bad misaligned movie smooching. Apparently it’s bad enough to make Jake reconsider, and he pulls away and tells Tanya that he just can’t do this. They agree to forget this ever happened. I’m gonna remember the bad kissing for a while.

Since Tanya only has one thing to offer, she puts it out there again: how about another flight? She takes Jake and his wife up, on the theory that Annie will be so impressed that she’ll have to support his pilot dreams. It is also an opportunity for Tanya to have an extremely vivid fantasy about shoving Annie out of the plane. After class, Annie tells Jake she doesn’t like Tanya, but that he can keep taking lessons if he wants. It’s a fairy tale of reluctant spousal support.

At Jake’s next class, he and Tanya fly low over Jake’s own house. What an interesting coincidence, muses Tanya, while tapping on her phone. Another interesting coincidence: Annie is pulling into the driveway right now! You can tell it’s her because she has this distinctive and absurd hot pink straw trilby that she wears all the time. What is with Lifetime movies and hats lately? There’s also a guy with Annie, and they’re smooching! Buh-whaaaaa? Married women can’t kiss other men, it’s illegal! When Jake gets home, Annie’s all excited because something something dissertation, but Jake tells her that he saw her with that other guy. She swears she has no idea what he’s talking about, but he goes to stay with his friend Tom, and has flashbacks to the first twenty minutes of this movie as he drives off. Jake stays with his friend Tom for the whole rest of the movie but we never meet Tom. They simply weren’t budgeted for this “Tom” but it was too late to change the script.

At flight school, Tanya shows the students the first-aid kit, which has chloroform in it, did you see that? did you see the chloroform? Good. After class, Jake tells Tanya that he and his wife are taking a break, since he saw her with another man. Tanya decides that it’s appropriate to ask him out right now, but it is not, in fact, appropriate, and he says no. On his way out, Jake runs into two pretty women dressed like flight attendants, who are poaching students for a rival flight school run by a guy named Gonzo. Tanya storms out and tells them to get lost, and informs Jake that she used to race against Gonzo and he sucks. I believe her, because no grown man should be named “Gonzo.” Jake disregards Tanya’s warnings and goes to an open house at Gonzo’s flight school anyway. The two pretty women are there, still dressed like flight attendants. This would be a good use of holograms, rather than making actual human women trail a stunt pilot while wearing short dresses and little hats. Gonzo tells Jake he knows Tanya, and she’s great, but that if he wants to make a career of this, he has to come to Gonzo’s school.

After the open house, Jake gets a call from his wife, which he doesn’t pick up, and one from Tanya, which he does. She was just lying there, thinking about him, and no one who has ever said this sentence wasn’t hoping it would lead to phone sex. It does not lead to phone sex here, it just leads to Jake telling Tanya that actually he’s going to take lessons from Gonzo instead of her. Gonzo has never asked him on a date the second he heard he was separated from his wife, so. Tanya flips out and says that Gonzo is reckless, and Jake replies that he has checked his safety records, he’s never crashed. “OH and I HAVE,” snaps Tanya. Literally yes! There’s a pretty slim margin for error on this, Tanya! Jake tells her that she’s great, and he’ll uhhhh keep in touch, for sure, but he’s made up his mind. Tanya cries and cries. It’s cool how no one in this movie has any personality or chemistry with each other. The kissing! It was bad! You can find someone else to ineptly kiss you, Tanya! There are other Jakes out there, even!

Over breakfast, Annie tells her horrible mom that she and Jake are separated. “That son of a bitch!” she yelps. How can she sell him to The Investors if they get a divorce! I mean? You don’t have to? You can just fire him whenever? You only gave him a job because he’s married to your daughter even though you despise him to your very core? Annie pleads with her mom to not mention any of this to him, and definitely to not go to his friend’s house to yell at him. Margaret, in a completely different movie from the rest of us, agrees and then goes to Jake’s friend’s house to yell at him anyway, to no effect. I cannot convey to you how unpleasant this woman is. She looks like Liza Minnelli but has the charm of Ayn Rand. She makes me physically tense up whenever she appears. Remarkable.

Before Jake’s next class at Gonzo’s (slogan: “Reckless But in a Fun, Cool Way Since 2005”), Tanya sneaks in and snips a wire in Gonzo’s plane, causing him to crash his plane in front of God and everybody: the sexy stewardesses, who only wanted to alluringly arrange two tiny trays of pastries; Jake, who wanted to go up with him in his plane; Jake’s execrable mother-in-law, who doesn’t want Jake to RUIN her daughter’s MARRIAGE and who snapped at him to “wipe that ADD grin off his face” like what?; and of course Tanya, who finally made this movie Deadly. There’s no mile high club yet, but I’ll take it.

Some indeterminate amount of time later, Tanya shows up at Jake’s work. She hasn’t heard from him in a while, and Gonzo’s flight school shut down. Actually, is Gonzo dead? I was assuming but I’m not sure. It’s fine. Tanya offers to give him lessons for free, because he was born to fly. Was he? This is still not how reincarnation works, and he seems like a guy who just kinda likes to fly airplanes. Margaret sees the two of them in the break room, as Tanya is leaving, and she demands to know if that’s his girlfriend, and tells him that the only reason she hasn’t fired him is that Annie begged her not to. It seems like not working for Margaret would actually be really great for him! He’s got at least a few years experience managing a warehouse, surely someone in another warehouse would hire him, someone who wouldn’t follow him home and shriek at him about the state of his marriage. Is Annie making Jake keep his job as punishment?

Regardless of these compelling arguments I have made to the characters in this movie, Margaret tracks down Tanya and confronts her at the flight school. Tanya assures her there’s nothing romantic going on, but Margaret wears her down with that cheese grater personality and gets her to promise not to give Jake lessons. Great! I’m glad Margaret got what she wanted, she deserves it and she has a long drive ahead of her. Tanya offers to fly her to Santa Barbara for free instead of her having to make that drive, and Margaret kind of inexplicably takes her up on it. While in the air, Tanya asks Margaret why she hates her son-in-law so much, and Margaret goes off on a tear about how stupid he is, and how her daughter could have done so much better, and if Tanya thinks he could really be a pilot, then she’s as dumb as he is. So! Tanya pushes her out of the plane, and it isn’t a fantasy sequence, it’s for real. A weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I am levitating. My third eye is open and my heart is free.

The coroner calls Annie to tell her that her mother is dead, having “jumped off” a “bank building.” Sure! They were flying pretty low, and Tanya has impeccable aim. After the funeral, Annie tells Jake that she doesn’t understand, sure Margaret had her problems and hated everything about this planet and all the people on it except her daughter, but she definitely wasn’t suicidal. Also, now they have this business that they don’t know how to run. Jake very sensibly suggests selling the fucking thing, who cares, he’s gonna fly an airplane, neeeeerrrrrrrrr, vroooooom, chgchgchgchg (that last one is like the gunner noise? you know). Annie likes this new assertive Jake, who she swears again that she didn’t cheat on, and asks him to come home.

Well, since Margaret is dead, Tanya can teach Jake to fly guilt-free. She can also criticize his life choices, telling him he shouldn’t go back to Annie, who never even stood up for him when Margaret treated him like shit. Yes, well, everyone makes mistakes, says Jake. Tanya then takes the totally normal step of showing him aerial photos of his wife continuing to cheat on him, this time making out poolside. While Jake is doing a pretty good job multitasking flying a plane and thinking about his unfaithful wife, Tanya starts kissing him and climbs on top of him. Autopilot is incredible these days, so this is as safe as safe can be. As Tanya unzips his pants, Jake says, “Houston, we have a problem,” because maybe he thinks he’s flying a space shuttle, and then they’re in a hotel room making out on a bed. They have sex and snuggle and then Tanya asks what Jake’s going to do after they sell the business. He’s going to buy a 1947 Cessna! Nice. Tanya was thinking about borrowing a friend’s Gulfstream and going to Mexico for a bit, why not go right now? Yeah, sure, says Jake, he hadn’t just reconciled with his wife after the untimely death of her mom, so he’s got nothing going on.

Annie, who is wearing that fucking hat again, gets some mail meant for a neighbor and ends up chatting with her through her Ring doorbell. Her neighbor, Lindsey, conveys her condolences about Annie’s mom through the doorbell. We have strayed so far from God’s light. When Annie realizes the doorbell is basically a surveillance camera, she realizes she can use it to prove she didn’t cheat on Jake. When Lindsey gets home, she explains that her husband is “amazing with computers and cameras” so he rigged the Ring to constantly record. “I don’t understand,” says Annie. What…is there to understand. I understood that, and I have to be told things like “if you mute the Discord tab, you can’t hear when people are talking to you.” Annie finds footage of a woman who is not her, but who is wearing an identical pink hat, pulling into her driveway, getting a message on her phone, and then pulling a dude in for a smooch. What the! So Annie looks up the license plate on the car and goes to this impostor’s house. Fake Annie is like, oh, yeah, they gave me this hat and took pictures of me and some dude from an airplane. This is why you shouldn’t have trademark accessories! If you must have them, they should be a lot less ridiculous than this hat. Annie texts Jake that Tanya framed her, but Tanya sees Jake’s phone before he does, and makes plans to meet at the house. She tells Jake she’s uhhhh got some errands to run before they can go to Mexico. Normal errands. Nothing deadly!

Remember that chloroform? I hope you remember the chloroform. Tanya remembers the chloroform! She goes to Annie and Jake’s house and chloroforms a screaming, flailing Annie, in broad daylight on a densely populated residential street. You shove one harpy out of your plane and you feel like you can get away with anything, you know? Tanya binds and gags the unconscious Annie and puts her in a big wooden crate.

As Tanya is loading the crate into the plane, Jake shows up at the airport and cheerfully asks what’s in the crate. Tanya says it’s just a delivery she has to make, no worries, and Jake laughs that that’s what she said before they went to Palm Springs, ha ha, you can’t trust her, and maybe Margaret had a point about Jake’s intellect. The box gets loaded in, they take off, and then like immediately we are watching Jake and Tanya bone on top of the crate, while the plane is on autopilot. Finally this movie has fully lived up to its title, right at the…..climax. Listen, I’m not happy with that either. After they fulfill the movie’s contractual obligations, they go back to the cockpit (haha) and Jake asks what’s in the box. Tanya improvises an amazing story about pellets of fish food with tracking devices inside them that can be used to track the migratory patterns of dolphins and whales, and you can’t open the box to see this really cool thing because you know how stinky fish food is. And yes, the box is biodegradable, we’re just gonna throw the whole thing in the ocean. It’s fine!! Stop asking questions and throw this box in the ocean!!

Jake drags the box to the door but just before he can drop it in, Annie wakes up and yells for help. Jake puts the box down and wheels on Tanya. This box is supposed to be full of smelly but technologically impressive fish food, not his wife! What the hell! Tanya reminds him that Annie said he was too stupid to be a pilot, and that she needs to be disposed of like her mother. Jake realizes Tanya killed Margaret, and she yells that she LIBERATED him from Margaret, which is honestly fair. Horrible woman! I cannot stress this enough! If Jake isn’t going to go along with her plan, she’s just gonna let him and his wife go up in a ball of fire. See if I care, okay! I face no consequences for my actions, I didn’t even lose my pilot’s license after I caused a fatal crash! I alone am truly free! So Tanya whacks Jake on the noggin, turns off the autopilot, and jumps out of the plane with a parachute. I assume they’re not over the ocean anymore. Annie manages to free herself from the box, and Jake regains consciousness just in time to save her from trying to land the plane herself. Turns out Jake knows how to fly planes, and Annie does not. Let him have this, Annie, even if he makes a crack about how he had a really good teacher. They swoop around until they see Tanya, and then knock her down with the jet engines. You did it! Surely your wife will respect you now!

Some time later, let’s call it the next day, who knows, Jake and Annie are at the airport, because he’s finally buying that 1947 Cessna he’s always wanted since earlier in the movie. Before they take it up, Jake confesses to Annie that he did indeed sleep with Tanya, and Annie replies, “you know my professor? Well, never mind,” and skips away. “What?” replies a gobsmacked Jake. And that’s how the movie ends, with a bookend of [upbeat music] and everything.

So that’s the end of this movie, but did you know that Bari Weiss, noted bad opinion haver, has a Substack? I sent her an email welcoming her to the platform and telling her to go fuck herself, because I said I would do that if I got a new subscriber, and she immediately replied “thanks for your passion!” so that was great. A perfect interaction. But there are so many more people with Substacks that I could send that email to. Seth Abramson! Erick Erickson! Mark Halperin, who charges FIFTY DOLLARS a month! Subscribe now and I will send one email to a despicable person telling them I hate them. You’ve read this far! It’s a good deal! Think about it!