Movie Review: Obsessed

Obsessed expands on Fatal Attraction’s 1987 women’s movement backlash, but don’t expect a pot full of boiling bunnies, because nothing so creatively crazy ever happens in Obsessed.

Derek Charles (Idris Elba) is the perfect man. He’s rich, successful, articulate, built like Achilles, and while his wife Sharon (Beyonce Knowles) never quite comes out and says it, I suspect she finds this perfection to be a little more of a curse than blessing. She was once an assistant in the firm he still works at, and the realization that he so easily wooed her in this same environment leads Sharon to ban her husband from having any female assistants. This rule, however, does not apply to temps, and the new one filling in for his assistant Patrick is smoking hot.

Lisa (Ali Larter) is charming, efficient and manipulative. She switches jobs with the other temps, organizers her hours around Derek and tries to seduce him at the company Christmas party which conveniently has a no-wife-allowed clause. He rejects her (because that’s what men in movies with forty-five minutes or so left do), and she gets in full on stalker mode, visiting Derek’s home and surprising him in his car with skimpy lingerie (because that‘s what women in movies with forty minutes or so left do). All this carousing comes to a head during a business retreat, and some sort of resolution is achieved, though it is in no way as cool or satisfying as the ones in Consenting Adults, Fatal Attraction or even your run-of-the-mill romance novels.

Obsessed is a movie for women who think sleeping with a man will make him fall in love, for men who think buying a woman’s affection is the same thing as stealing her heart. It’s for the guy who wears an Abercrombie shirt because he heard chicks like that sort of thing and for the girl who grins and bears it because a house in suburbia is a house in suburbia. Obsessed is a movie made by people and for people who just don’t get it, who don’t understand the ends only matter if you sacrificed something to get there.

Genre: Thriller

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Trailer

Movie Website: AreYouObsessed.com

Actors/Actresses: Beyonce Knowles, Idris Elba, Ali Larter, Jerry O’Connell, Christine Lahti

Our Verdict:

Obsessed is not a bad film because it treads over the same ground as better efforts like Fatal Attraction and Consenting Adults; it’s a bad film because it is a lifeless work of art.