Critic's Grade: D-

Frank's film tip: Why would anyone be OBSESSED about an interminably flaccid FATAL ATTRACTION knock-off?

Let’s face facts, folks...the Lifetime Channel serves up better zesty cheap-minded seductress thrillers than director Steve Shill’s uninspired, generic psycho-chick flick Obsessed. This awful Fatal Attraction knockoff looks glossy and impishly naughty in its tawdry tale of sexual obsession of the home-wrecking kind. Unfortunately, that familiar adage applies to the spineless spectacle of Obsessed...you know...that looks can be quite deceiving. Basically, Shill’s faceless stalker entry is a dismissive stunt that fails to carry out its titillating tendencies.

There’s nothing in Obsessed that audiences haven’t seen before which sums up the anticipation of the woefully pedestrian movie’s transparent distinctiveness. Shill’s junk-minded narrative screams guilty pleasure but this mindless “raging-and-roguish” wicked woman saga needlessly drags and creates all the sparks of your car’s defective muffler scrapping the pavement. Sure, the casting is decent when featuring ebony studmuffin Idris Elba and the explosively sexy salt-and-pepper combo of curvaceous cuties Ali Larter and Beyonce Knowles (in non-singing form of course). Nevertheless, Obsessed is never trashy, taut or tricky enough to be memorable as anything but a forgettable farce drawing unintentional chuckles.

Handsome Derek (Elba, “The Wire”, “The Office”) works in finances and had just got a well-deserved promotion. Derek is blessed because he seems to have it made. He has a challenging and well-paid professional job and a voluptuous wife named Sharon (Knowles) to go home to for comfort. However, the good-looking Derek has the notable prospects that most women would cherish—particularly in that of an unstable blonde bombshell office temp named Lisa (Larter) whose immense attraction to her hunkish moving target proves to be quite fatal for all involved.

The scheming Lisa has the lusty eyes for Derek but continually is a disruptive force at the office. Between her surging hormones and disdain for her co-workers Lisa’s passion for the married Derek takes on a whole new complication. Unable to control his curvy yet twisted admirer, Derek simply chooses to dodge the issue by not mentioning anything to his spouse Sharon in hopes that the heat would subside from the presumptuous temptress. Wrong move, Derek!

Naturally, most viewers know what’s coming up in the much discussed rag tag confrontation that transpires between Beyonce’s scorned Sharon and Ali’s seedy vixen Lisa in a climax billed as the ultimate showdown in Cat-Fighting 101. It’s too bad that the movie’s monotonous build-up gets in the way of the so-called hair-ripping hedonism. With Beyonce’s Sharon wanting to kick some pushy tail and Larter’s Lisa desiring some forbidden loving from her co-working Cassanova it is no wonder that Elba’s Derek did not walk out on the tempered tandem and find a redhead to escape their caustic craziness.

The notoriously spotty script has all the complication of a box of broken magic markers. Scribers David Loughery and Will Packer leave nothing to the imagination in a manufactured melodrama going through the predictable motions of recycled excitement. The material is indifferent and implausible and never is interested in asking pertinent questions or addressing the ramifications of such marital strife brought on by a harassing hussy wanting to sow her misguided oats.

Curiously, the movie shuns the racial angle in having a gorgeous white sexpot crave a black stud at the expense of his exasperated black wife. Even 2008’s mediocre-received Lakeview Terrace ventured to explore the race-relations behind interracial hook-ups. Conveniently, the movie wants to play it safe as being colorblind regardless the desirable witch looking to break up a thriving marriage. Sadly, Obsessed isn’t psychologically deep enough or honest in its pseudo-provocative platitudes. All Obsessed wants to do it strut around its nonsensical noisiness in sensational high gear.

Ironically, the intermittent sparks fly when Elba and bad girl Larter share scenes in nerve-racking fashion. As for the Elba-Knowles pairing, their chemistry has all the muster of an ice tray without cubes. On board for filler are Jerry O’Connell as Elba’s horny workplace sidekick. Also, gay secretary Matthew Humphreys registers as the inquisitive source observing the office dirt. Granted that this was a flexing vehicle for Beyonce Knowles to show her acting chops in a different venue away from the musical biopics. Let’s just say that the talented singer-actress may want to master the formatted musical first. After all, jumping hastily into mundane makeshift melodramas about husband-stealing honeybuns on the hunt is not exactly what one would call seeking out one’s cinematic potential.

Puerile and simplistic in its synthetic gimmickry, Obsessed oozes nothing but contempt and a cornball solution for exploiting the repetitive misogynist melodramas that long stopped being in vogue since the Reagan administration.

Frank rates this film: * 1/2 stars (out of 4 stars)

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