Vicious Affair

With the 2023 movie "Vicious Affair" being a Tubi movie, I have to admit that I wasn't exactly harboring the biggest of expectations to the movie. However, since it was a movie that I neither had heard about or seen before, then of course I opted to sit down and give director Chris Stokes the benefit of the doubt.

The storyline in "Vicious Affair" was pretty generic, even for a romantic love triangle drama. But hey, if you enjoy those kind of movies, then you're in for quite a treat from writers Marques Houston and Chris Stokes. However, I found the narrative, script and storyline to be a bland and overly generic one, where the writers offered nothing new to the genre. And that made "Vicious Affair" feel like any other random love triangle movie out there. Nothing really differentiated this 2023 movie from so many other similar movies.

It should be noted, though, that the acting performances in the movie were good. I was only vaguely familiar with actor Robert Ri'chard on the entire cast ensemble in this movie. Leading actresses Annie Ilonzeh and Blac Chyna carried the movie quite nicely with their performances.

Sure, "Vicious Affair" was watchable enough, but it wasn't a particularly outstanding or memorable movie experience. Nor is it a movie that I will ever return to watch a second time.

My rating of "Vicious Affair" lands on a four out of ten stars.

This film essentially begins with "Kenneth Hastings" (Robert Richard) and his wife "Skylar Hastings" (Annie Ngosi Ilonzeh) having the time of their lives while enjoying each other's company. Unfortunately, their bliss is interrupted when Skylar receives a call from her best friend, "Kim" (Blac Chyna), who is crying because she has discovered that her husband is cheating on her. Naturally, being the loyal friend she is, Skylar allows her to stay in their home until the divorce is finalized and Kim can get back on her feet. The problem, however, is that Kim has now set her sights on Kenneth and soon becomes determined to steal him away from Skylar, regardless of what it takes. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will simply say that this movie started off rather slowly but picked up after the first 20 minutes or so before ending in a bizarre and totally unrealistic manner. Although I liked the performance of Annie Ngosi Ilonzeh, I must say that the entire setting seemed too superficial to be believable. Normal people don't live in beautiful houses or enjoy a life of luxury like that. Not without spending an incredible amount of time at work and coming home exhausted afterward. At least, that's how it seems to me. Likewise, the entire affair scenario defies reality as well. Be that as it may, while I don't consider this to be a terrible film by any means, it lacked the erotic passion and suspense necessary for a movie of this sort, and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.

Okay yes, the plot is very wattpad, it's very dhar Mann, not cutesy, not demure. And yes, the acting is flat and the characters are one dimensional.

But. It is funny to laugh at.

It does make an EFFORT at characterization. I have a feeling that all of these scenes at the beginning were an attempt to build our characters and get us into their heads before the drama starts.

It failed. The dialogue is so generic and flat that I found myself wondering if a teenager wrote the plot for a tumblr fanfic and AI stumbled across it and used it to create a script for our filmmakers. The plot really is that generic and lazy.

But like I said, this is fun to laugh at. Maybe it's just me, but I honestly enjoy finding these extremely low budget, bad drama movies- like the ones that failed to make it to Lifetime. They are so much more FUN than the ones that do this more successfully, with a bigger budget and better acting. Those ones are just boring, this is hilarious.

I tragically do not know if anyone else watches these bad romance flicks just to pick apart and laugh at the painful dialogue and youtube level acting but... you should. You should.

Chris Stokes' movies are all pretty much recycled plots of majority white cast movies like Fatal Attraction, Mikey, Sleeping With the Enemy etc with majority black casts, but this one, I'm just now realizing after over a year since it's been out, was next level in it's level of lazy plot theft. This movie has a similar plot, a similar scenes to his film Only 4 One Night, with only a few changes. Instead of the wife's sister staying over because the husband died, it's the wife's friend staying over because the husband cheated. This movie makes it more obvious that the husband was taken advantage of, the original movie blurs the lines too much. Both have an unbelievably perfect longtime married couple who act just like newlyweds, except in this one there's no kid. Other than those few exceptions, almost the same film. There's even a scene where two characters get it on in a public restroom in a club (ew) in both...