Fellas, do yourself a favor - if you have to see this, see it with your "woman" (by that I mean wife or very close significant other, not a first date for the love of Pete), and make sure she pays. You all know she wants to see it, and by the end you'll maybe even thank her for it. Obsessed is one of those movies that women love to watch in their PJ's on a Sunday afternoon with a pint of ice-cream when nothing else is on *except* for the trashiest piece of trash on TV. And make no mistake, Obsessed is such trash that it is a 3rd rate ripoff of Fatal Attraction, which many forget was *already* a rip-off on Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me. Here's what you need to know: nice business guy with lots of cake and a fine mansion and a super-fine wife and young tot gets derailed off of living in banality by a foxy-but-trouble type of girl who's working part time in the office.
That's it. No more explanation. If you can guess everything that the characters will do, or wont due to incompetence, then you're doing well. Obsessed makes no bones about being original, and in fact could be the precise template needed if anyone ever wanted to do a full-blown ZAZ-style parody on pscyho-chick movies. It takes itself so seriously that it's hard not to knock on it in most of the scenes - and it becomes further frustrating since out of the three main characters, one actor (Idris Elba) is actually very good, almost too good, for the material, and another (Ali Larter) fits in in her completely 1 1/2 dimensional role without much struggle. Only one, Beyonce, seems to be actually trying too hard to "act" and again gets in trouble as she did in Dreamgirls.
The direction is very slack- considering it's a TV guy who did it, maybe only TV according to his creds- and the writing is slack-ier. The development of characterization and plot moves along like a expertly crafted diarrhea, meaning that it never really stops from its trajectory, and it may be a little smooth going, but it also hurts trying to see it accomplish anything aside from pain. And yet, as far as painful cinema goes, it could've been worse. It certainly has the grace to give us a gigantic cat-fight at the end that you'd expect samurai swords. It's not campy enough to recommend, and by no means if you are a heterosexual male will you get much satisfaction out of it. Girls will giggle and be fine with stuff that is run of the mill, with a few jolting twists along the way.
