Obsessed

Obsessed (2009) – on rental. My only impression of Obsessed comes from a  trailer that was screened during Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen if I remember correctly. The general premise of the film was easy to tell from just the short preview: that Obsessed was an updated version of the 1987 classic Fatal Attraction, starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas.

For the benefit of those of us who aren’t familiar with the 22 year old thriller, the story in Obsessed goes like this. Derek Charles is a happily married man to his homemaker wife Sharon, and baby boy Kyle. A temp, Lisa, joins his company and develops feelings for him which Charles unintentionally encourages since he’s your typical nice-guy. Things reach a head when Lisa thinks her crush on Charles will be reciprocated, and when it’s not, she goes berserk, stalks Charles – and the latter’s marriage gets into jeopardy.

There are a couple of significant changes from the old classic though in this new film, and many of them turned out all wrong. For starters, though Charles is played by Idris Elba, a physically imposing British theatrical actor, he’s written as a spineless weakling in Obsessed. The guy wilts, gives into his wife too easily, and you’ll wonder how a guy like him could even climb up the corporate ladder to occupy a high rung the film writes him as.

OK one might think that the strength in his union comes from his wife Sharon; but actress Beyoncé Knowles has really hammed it up in this one. She’s thoroughly annoying, bitchy, and barrels into impulsive judgment at the first whiff of her husband’s possible extra-marital affair.

Ali Larter plays Lisa, and her role of the office flirt turned psycho when spurned isn’t too different from the role she’s already very famous for in the Heroes TV series. Trouble is: you never quite get a clear picture why she’s going after Charles, outside the oft repeated dialog remark that he’s “such a nice guy” in the script. With that Fail, you don’t empathize with her. When she comes solidly between Charles and Sharon and arguments turn to blows, it’s hard to decide who to root for: the weakling, the vamp seductress, or the annoying wife. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also an incredibly dumb investigator detective in this film who’d believe anything witnesses tell her.

The film does have one interesting and much-talked about scene: a big cat-fight between Sharon and Lisa where the two of them look pretty seriously intent on clawing each other’s eyes out. Their fight involves lamps, telephones, wooden planks, lamp stands, chandeliers, staircases and even the attic LOL.

But outside that and as these plots go, you don’t need to watch beyond the first 15 minutes of the film to already guess what the ending is likely heading towards, and no there aren’t any surprises in Obsessed.

In all, in Obsessed, you get unsympathetic and unlikable characters in a story premise that already holds no surprises. Disappointing.