Category Archives: Reviews

When Obsession Turns Obvious

 

Brenda Song in Secret Obsession (2019)

Netflix has been thriving on the woman-in-peril sub-genre of filmmaking. It found an unexpected smash in Birdbox, starring Sandra Bullock as a mother fleeing unseen demons. It bought the TV show You, a half-season flop about a stalker boyfriend, from the Lifetime network and turned it into a series already greenlit for a second season.

Which makes the streaming service’s latest flick, Secret Obsession, so curious. It’s the kind of movie filmmakers don’t make anymore — and for good reason.

Suspense-free and trope-filled, Obsession is a particularly odd choice for Netflix, which is trying to establish its original features as serious, event cinema. But this latest entry feels slapdash and cheap, the kind of fare usually relegated to weeknight time-filler fare on dying cable networks. It feels like someone owed someone a favor to get this made.

Directed by television veteran Peter Sullivan (The Sandman), it’s difficult to know where to start with Obsession: its give-all-away trailer, its inevitable plot arc or its worst offense, boredom. This is one of those rare films that would have been better had it been worse; a good dose of camp would at least have made for a fun (or funny) way to spend an hour and a half.

Instead, we get a thriller that does not thrill, a suspense movie with as much suspense as a Beagle, and a production that will do little to fend off the competition of ascending streaming services.

Obsession’s opening scene begins with a glimmer of hope for entertainment: A woman flees a silent, sinister pursuer around a highway rest stop in driving rain. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but it’s too simple to screw up. After that, though, it’s all downhill.

Our protagonist, Jennifer (Brenda Song), evades her tormentor, only to be hit by a passing car. The driver gets her to a hospital while her husband, Russell (Mike Vogel), arrives shortly thereafter. The doctors tell him she’ll be okay, but she’s got a bad case of the most plot-forwarding injury of all, amnesia. Memento was the last film to use that device effectively, and woe to the director who tries to employ it as effectively.

Jennifer can’t remember a thing, leaving it to Russell to remind her who she is as he nurses her back to health. Something, though, seems fishy, raising the suspicion of Detective Frank Page (Dennis Haysbert), who comes with his own convenient and tragic backstory, along with a doubting police chief.

That Page (or Jennifer herself) wouldn’t notice the countless holes in the story immediately is Obsession‘s first major misstep. This is a movie that would have us believe that a patient can undergo a days-long course of medical treatment without ever being positively identified — and that same patient can subsequently be released into the care of someone who also hasn’t identified themselves. A good 10 minutes of “Secret Obsession” consists of people slowly realizing that they don’t have any idea who the main characters of this story actually are.

Still, Russell is allowed to bring Jennifer to a palatial home in secluded woods 20 miles north of San Francisco — and a mile from the nearest neighbor. A good 10 minutes is burned on Jennifer trying to find a cell-phone signal. (She never does.)

Though Obsession hoists as many red flags as the Kremlin, Jennifer is the last to see any of them, allowing her husband to let his own psycho flag fly. Instead of slowly revealing the dark side of our villain, as You, Misery, Fatal Attraction and innumerable others did, Obsession seems impatient to get to the point we all see coming, and the rush is needless.

Song is apt as the movie’s heroine, but the best performance by far comes from Haysbert. While he’s become known as the Allstate insurance guy, he’s a terrific actor whose credits include Heat, Major League and 24.

Alas, he’s not in the film often enough to make it entertaining, and by the end of Obsession, you’ll be the one pining for amnesia.

Taxi!

Image result for stuber

 

Here’s the recipe for a summer buddy-cop film. One guy, usually the cop, is as big as a house with an inclination to break things: rules, orders, villains’ faces. The other guy is typically much smaller and much funnier and kind of goofy — and he’s driving the other guy nuts, even as circumstances force them to partner up and take on some bad people.

Sure, May-December cop buddy flicks were have been a cliche since 48 Hrs to Midnight Run to Rush Hour to Men in Black to Ride Along to Central Intelligence to The Heat to the most recent example, Stuber. But given the summer overflow of big-budget sequels, Disney remakes and comic book reboots, this paean to cop films of the 80’s and 90’s seems like a nostalgiac nod to stupidity. And, somehow, most of it works.

It’s hard to overstate how refreshing it is to see a studio movie as silly and self-contained as Michael Dowse’s Stuber. The biggest action scene takes place in a sporting goods store. The Avengers are nowhere to be found. And the hero isn’t fighting to save the planet, just to help pay for the small business he wants to open with his crush (a spinning class geared towards single women called “Spinsters”).

What makes Stuber a fresh approach to a tired genre is that it joins those rare films that are perfectly synced with the American zeitgeist. Just a  You’ve Got Mail came during the AOL boom and The Social Network hit shortly after Facebook became omnipresent, Stuber will likely go down as the first big-studio film to take on ride sharing services. It won’t stomp the competition at the multiplex, but Stuber hits all the topical notes for young viewers: overprotective parents, the crippling addiction to cellphones and the roulette wheel roll that is calling a ride share service.

Much of the comedy credit here goes to Kumail Nanjiani (the HBO series Silicon Valley, The Big Sick). Nanjiani’s deadpan expression to people getting rowdy, drunk and nauseas in the back of his leased electric car could likely carry its own film. But that wouldn’t make for a buddy cop flick, so Dowse cannily casts Dave Bautista as Vic (Guardians of the Galaxy) a cop colossus with anger issues, severe myopia and a temper that sends him through walls like a drunken Kool-Aid Man.

It’s a silly pairing, but silly is the point. This movie, after all, is called Stuber because the protagonist is named Stu and he drives for Uber. Get it? Subtle intelligence takes a pronounced backseat to mindless escapism.

Stuber stumbles when it actually tries to break from comedy cliches with some adult-level violence. As the pair close in on drug dealers Vic is chasing, Stu has to face off against the martial marts actor from The Raid. Even for a comedy this goofy, it’s a plot stretch. Not only does the film skewer the tropes of Hollywood cop films, it embraces more than a few.

But they aren’t fatal flaws, and the pairing of Nanjiani and Bautista is inspired, particularly Bautista. He may be built like a Mack truck, but he displays enough tenderness he may escape Hollywood’s villain circuit.

Stuber is intentionally dumb and a little bit clunky, but Nanjiani and Bautista click, the action sequences are well-filmed and the humor is sometimes brutally funny. In a summer of repetitious travels, Stuber makes for a refreshing escapist ride.

Hearts Versus Skins

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What do you call a movie that is so well-meaning it’s hard to criticize, yet so sporadic in execution it’s hard to be effusive? In this case, you call it Skin in the Game, a nobly-intended thriller about human trafficking that tackles an issue long deserving big-screen Hollywood treatment, but undercut by tropes that veer it into TV crime territory.

“Inspired by true events,” as the film pointedly notes, Skin has the difficult task of spotlighting a vital social topic without descending into exploitative sex and violence . And for the most part, it succeeds, but the low-budget movie occasionally resembles an episode of Law & Order: Vigilante Unit, with cardboard villains and little character arc.

Directed by first-time filmmaker Adisa and written by Steven Palmer, Skin takes a topic Hollywood typically relegates to impoverished nations and brings it stateside, in this case Los Angeles. We are introduced to Lena (Erica Ash), a former prostitute who has turned her life around by dedicating herself to helping abused women out of the sex trade business.

It’s a strong intro, and perhaps the best scene of the movie. Lena, called to a seedy hotel to retrieve a prostitute from an abusive pimp, sets the film’s tone immediately: the language is rough, vulgar, misogynistic and authentic. Violence is to be accepted, not avoided, and Lena’s understanding of that world saves the young woman’s life. It’s an effective prelude to the world we assume we’re about to enter.

Suddenly, however, that tenor changes into a buddy cop thriller when 15-year-old Dani (Sammi Hanratty) is abducted in broad daylight off a suburban sidewalk and finds herself immersed in the human trafficking underworld. To Skin‘s credit, the film takes care to show multiple angles of the trafficking plague, from criminals to victims to the cops trying to sort one from the other. Skin also emphasizes that women can victimize, too; Dani finds herself in a prostitution ring led by the ruthless Eve (Angelica Celaya), a character so vile she’d make a good Bond villain.

After learning police cannot act on a missing persons report for at least 24 hours, Lena and Dani’s mother Sharon (Elisabeth Harnois) take matters into their own hands, triggering the movie’s unsteadiest moments. The women comb the streets like veteran detectives, banter like buddy cops, and threaten to kill uncooperative suspects with a gusto that would make Charles Bronson proud.

Alas, what Skin needs is more humanization. The film explains that Lena and Sharon were once close friends (Lena is Dani’s godmother), but never reveals the fracture that ended the friendship and kept them from talking for years. The film is also strangely lit, sometimes as artificially brightened as a prime time TV show; Skin oddly rejects the use of much shadow for a story about the shadowy world of sex trafficking. And “inspired by true events” is too vague here, particularly for a film on this issue: we get no epilogue about the characters portrayed, their fates, or whether they were even real.

Still, it’s Ash (Starz’s Survivor’s Remorse) who keeps the film propelled and, at times, even riveting. Lena is utterly believable as a woman who entered prostitution unwillingly and paid the price for leaving the profession. She keeps joints in a cigarette case and gumption in her heart; her tough questioning of former colleagues and employers gives Skin its heart, even if it is an occasionally melodramatic one.

Skin in the Game is hardly going to set the standard for human trafficking films. But given the rarity of movies on the issue, particularly in the U.S., setting the standard may be less important than setting precedent.