Oh goodie, an erotic thriller has made it to cinemas. I get the feeling that I could have just put up that single sentence as the entire review, as that’s pretty much all that one needs to know about it in order to gauge whether they’ll be at all interested in it. And even then, as are the trappings of the genre, I doubt there’s a lot of legitimate entertainment value to be gotten out of a film like this. However, while I would be more than happy to proclaim a new ironic favourite, this film can’t even get to that level of quality. Or, at the very least, it insists it’s above that level of quality.
The story is basically a lamer Fatal Attraction, where wealthy sports manager Derrick (Michael Ealy), while in Vegas for a bachelor party, has a one-night fling with Valerie (Hillary Swank), who takes things in a homicidal direction afterwards. And the genre cribbing doesn’t end there, either; the first act has a heavy whiff of Mike Figgis’ One Night Stand (just replace jazz with modern trap pop), even including the stupid Pina Colada cop-out, and minor or not, the elevator in Valerie’s apartment looks damn-near identical to the one in Unfaithful. I guess ripping off Adrian Lyne just the once wasn’t enough.
But whatever. It’s derivative, but it’s not as if the genre has a lot of possibility for variation in its inherent make-up. Where this film gets some points back is in its presentation, which looks and sounds a lot better than one would expect from this subset. Regular Michael Mann collaborator Dante Spinelli as cinematographer adds a lot of style to the visuals, like with the scene showing Derrick ‘killing’ his spouse with the emphasis on the dropped wedding ring. On top of that, Geoff Zanelli’s soundtrack does a lot of the heavy lifting here, bringing those same noisy and industrial textures that made You Should Have Left’s soundtrack worthwhile. Snippets of it even sound a bit like the Pedestrian Deposit album Fatale, which is an aesthetic that works for a film trying to be this tense.
Unfortunately, that’s where the positives end, as the film proves undone by two key aspects: The acting and the writing. On the acting front, Michael Ealy just doesn’t work in the lead role. We’re supposed to sympathise with his position, or at least want to see him improve past the events that kick-started all this, but at best, he creates apathy, and at worst, disdain. His character being so well-off financially doesn’t help with the barrier to empathy, with a house that looks like Carl Johnson’s about to parachute in and take over the place.
Not only that but Hillary Swank doesn’t work in this film either, although not for lack of trying. She puts her all into this incredibly ambiguous character, shown to be a mother who will do anything to see her daughter again, but the script just keeps letting her down at every turn… which brings us to the writing, easily the biggest stain in this mess. Writer David Loughery has made attempts at homewrecking thrillers before with Obsessed, but for the geekier members of my readership, that name should ring a bell because he also wrote Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. So this isn’t the first time a man made of raw ego brought his words to the big screen (I swear, Deon Taylor has one of the most aggressively doting IMDB bios I’ve ever seen).
Anyway, the writing itself. It has the same problem as 365 Days in how, as basic trash cinema, this could’ve gotten by on its overly glossy visage, but instead tries to be something more and fails miserably. And this goes even further than 365 Days did, as it hints at some level of moral ambiguity with Valerie’s character but eventually unravels into raw genre stereotype. It can’t seem to make up its mind as to whether Valerie is a character we’re supposed to feel sorry for, or even root for in a morbid fashion, or if she’s just the latest instance of ‘don’t stick your dick in crazy’. The film at large has a similar unravelling effect, where it starts out okay (if, again, quite reminiscent of other works) but just keeps piling on more and more dumb decisions, contrivances, and just plain bad characterisation until the entire production buckles under the weight.
I haven’t seen any of Deon Taylor’s other films (nor would I choose to, after this), but this whole production highlights him as the poor man’s Tyler Perry. All the melodramatic nonsense and bonkers plot developments, but without any of the riff value because there’s too many legitimate efforts involved to write the whole thing off. After liking her so damn much in I Am Mother (and being quite disappointed with The Hunt), seeing Hillary Swank get dealt a raw deal like this is very disheartening, as it is for all the other production hands who are doing their damnedest to elevate such bargain bin material.
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