I’d like to call Obsessed a miserable failure, but that would imply this lazy waste of time had some sort of goal it failed to reach. It has nothing. No purpose, no drive, no direction. It just shiftlessly ambles forward buoyed by the assumption everyone will stop to watch a catfight, especially one involving Beyonce Knowles and Ali Larter. I did stop to soak it all in, a few million others will likely do the same, but like me, they’ll leave marveling a movie can feel so empty, useless and pathetic.
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 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 perhaps the most lifeless work of art I have ever encountered. Derek’s assistant Patrick is a flamboyant gay guy because Obsessed needs a snarky character. Jerry O’Connell is here because someone has to say, “Dude, that chick is hot.” Lisa stalks and terrorizes the Charles’ family, not because she’s an unstable home wrecker, but because this hollow, lifeless piece of shit film needs another woman for Beyonce to fight. I do not believe for a second this woman, so efficient, put together and charming, would drug a man to get him in bed. I do not believe for a second any woman would break into this particular man’s house, because he lacks even a shred of personality. I do not believe for a second anything about this movie because it’s a flimsy excuse for Beyonce to utter Will Smith one liners and wrestle on the floor with another woman in high heels and underwear.
You’re probably thinking that sounds hot. The whole Beyonce in high heels and Ali Larter in her underwear thing, but let me assure you it is disgusting, sophomoric and banal, contrived by immature men and women who think anything that sounds good on paper works in the real world. 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.
I hated every last god-forsaken thing about this depthless copout.
