| Review:
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Not exactly girl gladiatorial mud wrestling on display
for attentive male audiences, Obsessed expands on Fatal
Attraction's 1987 women's movement backlash, feminist phobic
theme park antics on screen back then, to take on unspoken
social entitlement issues. Though race, in stark contrast
to Obsessed screenwriter David Loughery's prior inflammatory
Lakeview Terrace, this time around is quite the elephant
in the room.***
Idris Elba is Derek in Obsessed, the upwardly mobile
formerly flirty corporate exec with a fondness for dating
down as an office player into temporary temp assistant flings.
Though he's more recently settled down with one of them,
his wife Sharon, played by Beyoncé Knowles. Who in an odd
role reversal, has now switched it up from playing somewhat
obsessed, outside looking in extra-marital lover Etta James
to Adrien Brody's music mogul Leonard Chess, in Cadillac
Records.***
Derek has sworn to a not entirely trusting Sharon,
to put a leash on his libido for good now, by hiring only
male assistants. But when his current underling falls ill,
bottle blonde sexpot in heat with boundary issues Lisa (Ali
Larter) shows up to fill in, when not making a far from
subtle play for her much too diplomatic boss. And with Lisa's
tendency to not take no for an answer, she's eventually
invading his McMansion in a pathological when not pathetic
bid to replace Sharon in his life, despite the involuntary
object of desire's utter revulsion at her every move.***
Obsessed bypasses race as a hot topic, and opts instead
for the pitfalls presenting themselves to the newly upwardly
mobile African Americans, where male power in this case
may serve as the ultimate female aphrodisiac. At the same
time, the main threat posed by black women, is not earning
more than a brother, but a desire to temp motherhood while
pursuing career fulfillment equal to a male mate, as in
the case of Derek's raging redhead, too tired for sex, vocationally
driven spouse, much to his dismay.***
But these potentially intriguing issues are barely
glimpsed and set aside in the movie, for seductive Dirty
Martinis, a ludicrous male date rape episode (can this really
be pulled off without dropping some Viagra into the doctored
cocktail too?), two working class women getting down and
dirty over an upscale alpha male, and an apparently incurable
case of stalkeritis that hopelessly baffles even the police.***
In any case the deplorable subliminal subtext here,
quite antithetical in the age of Obama, seems to be that
women are highly toxic creatures out to hunt down and subjugate
men, and that white sense of entitlement can be dangerous
to your health, no matter what your position on the economic
food chain, or theirs.***
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