There is one good reason to see the lifeless new thriller Obsessed, and his name is Idris Elba. I should immediately qualify that: Elba decidedly does not bring his A-game to this project (his A-game being immediately familiar to anyone who witnessed his tremendous performance as Stringer Bell in HBO's The Wire, among other fine roles). But he's sharing the screen mostly with Beyoncé Knowles, irrevocably entrenched in the choice to play her character at all times, no matter what the context, as a sassy black lady, and Ali Larter, mugging like a hacky vaudevillian. It's kind of an "any port in a storm" situation, but a good actor who isn't trying very hard is still miles better than a crummy actor who also isn't trying very hard.

The plot of the movie, to quote a much better screenwriter than Obsessed's David Loughery,* is "just a rehash of something that wasn't very good to begin with." We've got Derek Charles (Elba), see, who is happily married to his former secretary Sharon (Knowles), with a big house in the Los Angeles suburbs and a little toddler child who's just cuter than a barrel of buttons, and a swell job as the executive vice president of an investment brokerage. One day in the elevator to his office, he meets the new temp, Lisa (Larter), who seems nice and friendly and maybe a wee bit too flirty, but what harm did flirting ever do anybody, and at first Derek ignores the good advice of his co-worker and friend Ben (Jerry O'Connell), who warns him that Lisa is on the prowl, looking for a good man to possess. Ben turns out to be pretty savvy, as Lisa becomes increasingly forward at the office Christmas party and in the parking garage, until she unexpectedly quits. That turns out to be just the start of her stalkery obsession with Derek, which takes on an ever-more psychotic flavor, until she's doing things like breaking into the house and lying to police detectives about her suicide attempt.

What we have here is the reheated leftovers from the trashy 1987 potboiler Fatal Attraction, dressed up a bit differently; if that weren't bad enough, the primary difference between the two - in the newer film, Derek never cheats with Lisa before she hops on the Crazytown Limited - serves only to make Obsession that much weaker in the knees. I've rolled it around and around in my head, and I'm pretty sure that if the film has any real thematic drive or moral statement, it appears to be that grand old American standby, "Men are complete idiots", mixed with the equally well-worn "If men weren't idiots, they'd be better able to fend off the attacks of women, castrating harridans all of them."

Seriously. It's hard to imagine a more thankless role than Derek Charles, a fellow who comes across what feel like dozens of opportunities to stop everything with one well-placed conversation: with his wife, with the cops, with his boss, with the human resources guy, it doesn't matter. Elba isn't completely lost with this sow's ear, but there's only so much any one actor can do. He's got presence in spades, no doubt, but he is no better than the role permits. And that ain't a lot.

The film around him, though, is a trainwreck, pure and simple. A horribly bigoted trainwreck. Its outrageous sexism is right there on the surface for all to see, but that's not the only thing about it that's offensive. I'm not really prepared to join in the discussion of whether or not Obsessed is racist - it does seem a bit enthusiastic about the retrograde "white chick stealing the hunky black man" scenario, but to its credit, Elba and Knowles's ethnicity is never actually brought up. However it does seem a bit weird to me that nobody has bothered to notice how uncommonly homophobic it is, in the character of Derek's gay assistant Patrick (Matthew Humphreys), a character whose personality traits are all in the general family described by "catty, gossipy queen", and who manages to precipitate the film's climax by being so damn catty and queeny.

All this is just the icing on the cake, though, and the cake is that Obsessed is simply no damn good as a thriller. First-time feature director Steve Shill (a particularly apt name, given his aesthetic; almost as good as Taylor Hackford) is not incompetent - we know this from some of his quite fine television work - but he does nothing in this film that benefits the thrills or suspense that we've, telegraphing everything like mad, even without the benefit of James Dooley's horrendously pushy score. His weakness is most obviously on display in the scenes involving Lisa's stalking, whether of Derek or Sharon; she hops around the set in impossible ways, possessing the same skill set as a slasher film's psycho killer only without the same bloodlust. There's a certain gaudy charm to the Amazing Teleporting Villain when Jason Voorhees is doing it; when it's a reed-thing pin-up girl in what purports to be a vaguely realistic domestic thriller, it is rather obnoxious.

At a certain point in the finale, the only time when the movie really gets any blood pumping through its withered veins at all (if you've seen the hugely spoilerific trailer, you know that this is between Sharon and Lisa), I found myself enjoying the film on the shallow but present level of cheap exploitation: two girls beating each other up and destroying a house. It actually got me thinking about how, in another age and with a different production crew, Obsessed might have even been a good blaxploitation film. It's easy to imagine Sharon being played by a young Pam Grier as the avenging black woman out to stop the grasping white bitch who's trying to control a black man, just in a slightly different way than The Man usually does. This thought briefly comforted me, but it just as quickly made me even more depressed. Beyoncé Knowles is certainly no Pam Grier, and Obsessed lacks even the social awareness of a blaxploitation quickie; it is a hollow experience altogether, based entirely on its protagonist's despicable stupidity and unable to connect in a real way to anything human except the retrograde masculine fear of female sexuality. I will not do a disservice to the world of genre films by calling this trash; it is mere junk.

4/10