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Movie Review: 'Fatale' Stumbles Over Fatal Attraction Tropes

Director Deon Taylor wastes a Two-Time Academy Award winner on a bumbling Fatal Attraction knock off in 'Fatale.'

By Sean PatrickPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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Fatale stars Michael Ealy in yet another low rent thriller where he’s the victim of some crazed lunatic. Last year, Ealy was menaced by Dennis Quaid just because he and his wife decided to buy Quaid’s former family home in The Intruder. This year, Ealy finds himself menaced by two time Academy Award winning actress Hilary Swank after he sleeps with her and doesn’t tell her that he’s a married man.

Ealy himself played the crazy, obsessed stalker not all that long ago in the remarkably terrible thriller The Perfect Man. Why he is drawn to this kind of bargain basement, derivative, and often poorly made material is baffling. Ealy is a handsome guy who has yet to find himself as a movie star. He’s had a couple of hit movies, the Think Like a Man movies made money, but his choice of material indicates either bad management or bad taste.

Fatale stars Michael Ealy as Derrick Tyler, a former athlete turned sports agent who has a thriving company, a beautiful wife, Tracy played by Damaris Lewis, and the kind of home that gets featured in Architecture magazines. So, naturally, he has to screw all of that up. Under pressure from his business partner, Rafe (Mike Colter), and worried that his wife is cheating on him, Derrick attends a Las Vegas bachelor party where he meets a beautiful stranger.

Two-time Academy Award winning actress Hilary Swank plays Valerie Quinlan, Derrick’s Las Vegas one night stand. Red flags are apparent from moment one as Valerie is in Las Vegas alone, no friends or family. That’s weird right? Then, after they’ve spent the night together, Derrick wakes up to find that Valerie has locked his cellphone in the hotel room safe. She only gives him the combination after they have sex again.

Quirky or crazy? Watch and find out.

Upon returning to Los Angeles, Derrick feels guilty and tries to reconcile with Tracy. After they spend a romantic night together, they are awakened by an intruder. Derrick is nearly killed and the bad guy manages to get away. The detective called in to investigate the case, surprise, surprise, is Detective Valerie Quinlan.

Can we get a moratorium on scenes where two people who recently had sex pretend not to know each other in front of the cuckolded partner? I swear that I’ve seen this scene play out in a dozen different movies about cheating men and angry, scorned sex partners. The first time this scene was used it was kind of exciting. The 95th time this scene is replayed, it's akin to a copy of a copy of a copy, less recognizable and barely affective.

Plot dictates that Valerie doesn’t out Derrick as a cheater because she’s a crazy person and she plans to hold this information over his head as she enacts a bizarre and convoluted plot. This scheme, a more appropriately comical word, will involve her ex-husband and the daughter being kept from her in a nasty custody battle.

Convoluted doesn’t begin to describe how silly the plot of Fatale will become as it proceeds. Director Deon Taylor tries to bring an element of Alfred Hitchcock style trickery to the plot and fails miserably. Where Hitchcock plots operate with Swiss watch efficiency, even in his lesser works, Taylor’s thrillers are lumbering, clumsy and downright silly.

The makers of Fatale appear to think that lifting heavily from better or better known movies is enough to make their movie good. They are very much mistaken. Yes, Fatale brings to mind Fatal Attraction but Fatal Attraction, at the very least, had the charge of being the originator of a trope. Not a good trope, but one that has become familiar not unlike a meme.

Since Fatal Attraction, movies about scorned one night stands, ex-wives, or straight up killers, have become a sub-genre all of their own. IMBD has a list of more than 100 movies with variations on Glenn Close's iconic psycho performance. Everyone from Ali Larter to Katherine Heigl to Naomi Watts has portrayed some variation of this trope and the bloom has been off the rose of this plot for many years.

The whole 'Women be crazy' plot has some ugly undertones to it as if women are somehow more prone to jealousy or insanity than men. Followers of the true crime genre can tell you, this is a purely Hollywood conception. Sure, there are plenty of women who've committed horrible acts of jealousy and revenge, but reality tells us, more often than not, men are the ones who can't cope with a break up or have been so messed up by societal pressures that they can't conceive of things such as female sexual freedom.

Hollywood filmmakers, mostly men, would have you believe that women can't handle sexual independence. That somehow, women are more traditional and puritanical while men are more open and eager toward infidelity. Women are too emotional for the one night stand, women are clingy and could not possibly have sex without the constraints of a loving relationship. The whole 'women be crazy' sub-genre was pioneered by men for whom sexual freedom and agency belongs solely to men. Hence why the entire sub-genre needs to go away.

To call Fatale derivative is, perhaps, as kind as someone could be to a movie so fussily cobbled together out of the meme-able parts of other movies. Deon Taylor might call what he does homage but the reality is that Fatale is so clumsily assembled that it could just as easily have stumbled over plot points from better known movies as have been inspired by them.

Fatale is in theaters nationwide before a move to Streaming Rental services in early to mid-January.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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