The Bride he bought online

IMDb

• What starts out as a harmless prank blog takes a dark turn for 17-year-old Avery when her friends, Mandy and Kaley, create a fake profile for an international dating site and begin to communicate with a lonely, socially inept computer programmer named John. Having lived a life of isolation and bullying, the humiliation he feels when he realizes he's been duped unleashes a wrath that no one would have expected.
  - Written by Reel One Entertainment

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Lifetime Movie The Bride He Bought Online Teaches Us Not To Catfish Computer Nerds

• 4 weeks ago by Jill O’Rourke
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Oh, Lifetime. Always so good at reminding us that teenagers are the worst. Also at giving characters [adopts Liam Neeson voice] a very particular set of skills that are selectively convenient to the plot. Take, for example, last night’s movie The Bride He Bought Online, in which a computer programmer only realizes he’s been catfished after he loses hundreds of dollars and has his heart broken. Thank goodness he has all that computer knowledge to get revenge.

This week’s teenage protagonist is Avery (Anne Winters), whose classic Lifetime downfall is that she’s smart and thoughtful and could probably be friends with anyone she wanted, but she decides to hang out with the literal worst people available to her. In this case that’s super bitch Kaley (Annalisa Cochrane) and her minion Mandy (Lauren Gaw). Together the three of them enjoy wearing totally inappropriate clothing to school (I can see your butt cheeks, young lady) and running a blog on which they post videos of teachers getting pranked. They have a few thousand followers, and therefore Kayley is convinced it’s going to make them famous and she won’t have to go to college. Kayley doesn’t seem to know a lot about the Internet.

She also doesn’t seem to know that you probably shouldn’t try to fool an admitted computer programmer with a fake profile on a site for mail order brides. Luckily for Kaley, John (Travis Hammer) turns off the computer genius part of his brain when he sees pictures of Diwata, the fake Filipino woman Kaley is pretending to be. They end up talking, and he even sends her a video of himself playing the guitar. It’s all very pathetic, right down to the part where Diwata doesn’t show up to the airport on the flight he bought her a ticket for.

The whole time Kaley is playing this prank, Mandy is all, “I don’t know about this, Kaley. This seems kinda mean. Oh, you want me to film his sad reaction on my phone? Okay.” Avery manages not to play any direct part in the prank, but she allows herself to be pulled along for the ride and continues to hang out with these people even though she seems to spend the entire time rolling her eyes at them. Classic Cady Heron syndrome.

After his airport heartbreak, John finally thinks to do a reverse image search on Diwata’s photos and discovers they depict a model who died in a car crash several years ago. Could have saved himself a lot of sadness and about an hour and forty-five minutes of movie time if he’d done that before, but whatever. Having finally remembered that he’s a computer wiz, John is able to trace the prank back to Kaley and her friends. Since Avery made her Facebook check-ins public so literally anyone can see where she is, John tracks her down and spies on her and Mandy at their local skate park hangout.

John wants revenge, so he hires a male prostitute named Nick (Randy Blekitas) to flirt with the girls and get their phone numbers. Then the prankee becomes the prankster. (Unfortunately that wasn’t a line in the movie.) John starts texting Kaley as Nick, and you might think he plans to make her fall in love with him before standing her up, just to make things even. But this is a Lifetime movie, so of course he has much more sinister things in mind.

John lures Kaley and Mandy to the skate park after dark, making them think they’re meeting Nick there. When the two girls split up, he kidnaps Mandy and takes her to a generic TV movie warehouse, complete with graffiti and random pieces of trash here and there that will prove useful to the plot. Once Mandy’s tied up and wastes no time placing the blame on Kaley, John heads to her house, where he turns off her security system and all the lights using a few keys on his computer. This is just a reminder that John has the technological talent to do all this, but he didn’t think to do a reverse image search until he’d already paid for his fake girlfriend’s plane ticket.

The next day, Mandy and Kaley’s parents are already working with a lady detective (Alexandra Paul), so you know they’re gonna get found. Avery shows her a photo of Nick she took. I bet she thought she was safe because she was, like, totally against this prank, and the universe is rewarding her for it. But she’s very, very wrong. Somehow John gets into her house in broad daylight with her mom (Jamie Luner, who’s been in approximately every Lifetime movie ever) nowhere to be found.

Now that John has all three girls tied up in his warehouse, he’s able to lecture them about hurting people and being a pariah and how American women aren’t grateful like foreign women are, and blah blah blah. I thought he was trying to talk them to death. My favorite part is when he says his father used to tell him he has to walk in another person’s shoes to understand them, and he used to think he meant he had to put their shoes on, “but now I realize he meant it in a figurative way.” Really, John the computer wiz? You just realized that today?

Even though Mandy screams every five seconds that he’s going to kill them, John says he has other plans for them. Plans like selling them into prostitution. That seems like an appropriate punishment for three stupid teenage girls who played an online prank, don’t you think? Unfortunately he only manages to sell Kaley (so convenient that it was the ringleader) before the sex traffickers bail on him without paying. Well, shit. Now what is he supposed to do with these other two girls he kidnapped?

John takes Mandy and Avery back to the warehouse. He has to leave Avery in the car while he ties Mandy up, and for some reason she doesn’t use that opportunity to make a run for it. Does his car have a child lock or did he do some computer wizardry on it? At least once they’re all in the warehouse, Avery takes advantage of the glass bottle just sitting on the ground and slices John’s arm with it. He’s very offended, and he runs home to bandage it. That’s when his neighbor from across the street, a prostitute (Kesia Elwin) who’s always showing him her bra through the window, shows up and notices his wound.

Prostitute, whose name I don’t remember and will therefore be referred to as just Prostitute (sorry), asks John if he’s done something illegal and offers to help him, whatever it is. Apparently the one thing she’s not so cool with is him selling teenage girls into prostitution. She tells him she knows a guy who can help, but I could tell she was bluffing and would try to save the girls. Gotta love a hooker with a heart of gold, right?

Unfortunately that hooker with a heart of gold ends up getting shot and killed by John, but not before she shoots and injures him. Mandy and Avery grab Prostitute’s phone (but not her gun, because ?????) and make a run for it. They call 911, who puts them through to the lady detective, who’s at John’s house thanks to prostitute Nick’s lead. (Wow, a lot of helpful prostitutes in this movie.)

John tries to chase after them for a while, but eventually he gives up and just collapses on the ground staring at a picture of his fake girlfriend on his phone. Then he has some sort of vision/memory/hallucination where he’s playing the guitar for a mannequin wearing a wedding dress (Did that actually happen? What’s going on here?) before he shoots himself.

Avery and Mandy are rescued, but Kaley hasn’t been found. And seven months later, she’s still missing. Translation: ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Avery ends the movie with a voiceover narration basically saying, “I’m not saying Kaley deserved it, but…” The subtitle of this movie should have been Blame Kaley. Don’t get me wrong, I hated her, and you can see from my posts about Justin Bieber that I’m all for stupid young people facing consequences for their behavior, but I’m not so into those consequences being sex trafficking. Call me old-fashioned.

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