Fatale (2020)
2020
R
102 Minutes
A married man is tricked into a murder scheme by a female police detective.
User Review
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Some femme fatales are forever etched in the history books, others fade into obscurity with every passing year. This “Fatale” however, suffers a very VERY sad delusion. Let me show you what I mean: With Deon Taylor back at it again, we have to delve through another pretentious retelling of a much better story, this time through the lenses of Fatal Attraction, and watch as mass panic and unintentional hilarity ensues. The film, I assume was clearly set up to approach the films selling point in a way that could have yielded thought-provoking ideas about racial stereotypes in sex only for it to abandon that thread right when the story could’ve gotten interesting and just serves up a rather dull, bareboned and illogical thriller glaring with plotholes in its place. Not to mention the amount of twists and turns that come your way takes the worst out of the CW’s 90’s era of soap operas and just makes the entire experience even more bloated than it probably needed to be.
Just like “The Intruder”, while Michael Ealy takes his role too seriously, Hilary Swank starts going campy and over-the-top with her role, under the full mindset of knowing what type of film she’s in. The editing is nothing to write home about except in some janky action sequences with some really fake looking CGI while the glossy cinematography and the high-end production design and costuming are admittedly not too shabby.....to a fault. I guess there is a watchable quality that comes with this film but compared to “The Intruder”, that’s not good enough because I think I understand why it’s hard for me to stand any movie he tries to directs.
He nicks out simple concepts that’ve been executed well enough in the past and then tries overwriting the simplicity in the worst way possible that make the story nigh-intolerable. They don’t want the story to be more complex between A hero going off against A villain but they also want huge expanding stories in the midst of all that monotony to pretend there’s a deeper theme going on to cover the malarkey. I can respect this movie for trying to have themes and for trying to say something but if this dull schtick is all you can get out of it, then there’s no point trying to have your cake and eat it too. Is that so hard to ask for?0 member like this review.
