Fatale: A shiny surface with pulp beneath

 

     It always starts with infidelity.

    An otherwise successful man veers from the straight-and-narrow by sleeping with an alluring woman who seems free of any moral constraints. Of course, it’s an illusion and his slip will lead to catastrophic consequences.

    Fatale — which stars Hilary Swank and Michael Ealy— presents itself as an unashamed piece of pulp entertainment that bends itself out of shape trying to add new wrinkles to a Fatal Attraction formula. 

     Ealy portrays Derrick Taylor, a  highly successful sports agent and partner in a super-profitable company. Swank’s Valerie Quinlan, the movie’s femme fatale, is a detective.

    I won’t say more other than to tell you that Derrick winds up as the suspect in a double murder that introduces more infidelities and betrayals into an already strained plot.

    Director Deon Taylor takes full advantage of the upscale aspirations of his characters. Derrick's home proves magazine-worthy and even Valerie's downtown loft seems stylish and desirable. 

    Put another way, just about everyone in the movie seems to have lost touch with the meaning of the words “middle class.” 

    At the same time, the screenplay by David Loughery imagines that the nouveau-riche sports agents — who happen to be black — can’t entirely escape motivations that push them into dangerous territory.

    Whatever the movie has to say about race comes across as inadvertent as Fatale tries to score with a mixture of glitz and voyeurism to which it applies dabs of violence and motivation.

    Mike Colter appears as Derrick's partner, a businessman who's eager to sell the firm, and Damaris Lewis appears as Derrick's beautiful wife. Neither actor gets much chance to stand-out.

    Danny Pino portrays a corrupt councilman who once was married to Valerie and now has custody of their daughter.

    Swank gives Valerie just enough suggestions of sanity to create some doubt about her motivations but formula demands that her character yield to the required extremes. 

    The rest of the cast serves the story but Fatale winds up as another helping of glamorized nonsense that shows little interest in anything more than its own glossy surface.

It was his home and he won't let go

The Intruder squanders any promise with a hopeless descent into horror cliches.

Indecision is a bad quality in a genre movie. If you take a look at IMDb, you'll find that The Intruder has been assigned multiple genre labels. This movie about a successful young black couple that buys a beautiful Napa Valley house only to be tormented by the home's previous owner carries a quartet of genre headings: drama, horror, mystery, and thriller.

Had the movie opted for mystery and drama, it might have proved less laughable. But thriller and horror elements wind up dominating. That leaves The Intruder with only one notable quality: an over-the-top performance from Dennis Quaid as an apparently helpful widower who refuses to abandon the house that he says he associates with his grown daughter and late wife.

If you'd never seen another movie, you might think that The Intruder is going to touch on psychological and perhaps racial issues. But you, as someone in possession of a reasonable amount of movie sentience, already know that the Quaid's Charlie Peck will go from annoying to menacing almost before you have a chance to take that first bite of popcorn.

And that's part of the movie's problem. Had director Deon Taylor and screenwriter David Loughery taken more time making us wonder about Quaid's character, the movie might have made its attractive young couple (Michael Ealy and Meagan Good) seem more credible. Good's character, in particular, suffers from a bad case of failure to see the obvious.

Allowing the audience to know more than the characters may be part of Taylor's strategy. It sets up the kind of obvious jump scares that mark standard horror, including a tired old standby that elicits audience groans and laughter. At one point, Good's character descends into a creepy basement with a flashlight. A vocal audience at a preview screening had no difficulty letting her know that she'd just made a really dumb move.

This kind of manipulation can be fun, but in the case of The Intruder, it drags the movie into a junk heap of silliness.

There isn't much help by way of a supporting cast, aside from Joseph Sikora, who plays Mike, a business partner of Ealy's Scott. They run a trendy San Francisco ad agency that has made them both a ton of money.

Feeble attempts are made to add psychological depth. Good's Annie can be jealous of her husband, who -- we learn -- has a good reason for not wanting guns around the house. But Quaid's Charlie Peck emerges as a monster who requires no other explanation than the fact that we're watching a movie that can't resist horror movie cliches. Oh well, Quaid takes on this duty with apparent glee.

Sledgehammer jolts of music and a tendency to telegraph its moves trample any suggestion of subtlety on the part of The Intruder. The result: The only thing that's intruded upon here is any desire the movie might have had to be taken seriously.