Deon Taylor
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Connections, in both directions
There’s an inescapable “Fatal Attraction” vibe to “Fatale,” though there’s another film from which it more significantly borrows a key plot element (to name it would be telling; let’s just say it’s a Hitchcock).
Taylor is so busy that Fatale throws back twice: first to erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction , then further to the twisty noirs that inspired them.
This miscasting is just one of the problems with Fatale , a movie that pretends it's going to be more than the second-rate Fatal Attraction ripoff it really is.
Culture Audience: “Fatale” will appeal primarily to people who like watching cheap, inferior ripoffs of “Fatal Attraction.”
Fatale is a silly, twisty, mildly effective mash-up of Unlawful Entry (1992) and Fatal Attraction (1987), and while the end result can’t even remotely reach their heights it’s no less entertaining for the effort.
Two-time Academy Award-winner Hilary Swank seems to be in slum mode with this mix of “Fatal Attraction” (1987) and crazy cop drama and the dark and droll revenge thriller “The Hunt” from earlier this year.
Black and Blue is a generic, by-the-books police action thriller that takes so many pages out of better police procedural action thrillers, such as Training Day and The Fugitive and then has the dialogue on par with every network police drama, which begs the question, “Are you sure this wasn’t a failed Starz miniseries or a Starz TV movie?”
And the premise itself is a bit too closely matched with Antoine Fuqua’s far more effective “Training Day,” down to a brazenly re-created bathtub scene that stands as a pointless remake rather than homage.
In movie speak, it translates the issues associated with Hurricane Katrina and Ferguson, Mo., into the Denzel Washington police thriller Training Day, modifying that fevered police-brutality scenario with a female protagonist so that it fits the millennium’s Me Too agenda.
Instead it hits it briefly and doesn’t do much with the topic, instead building a thriller that feels oddly derivative of Antoine Fuqua’s “Training Day.”
The result is decent, but not as much fun as I recall "The Warriors" being or with the same sort of Oscar-level performance of "Training Day." Director Deon Taylor gets some decent mileage out of the action scenes, and as long as you don't think about all of the movies featuring bad cops and/or those where the criminals want a certain cop dead, you might go along for the ride.
If I were one of those hackish ’90s screenwriters in Robert Altman’s The Player, my pitch of Black and Blue to the coked-up executive du jour would simply be “It’s Training Day meets The Hate U Give.” Just like Denzel’s unofficial Oscar reel from 2001, Black and Blue is about an idealistic rookie cop named Alicia (Naomie Harris) coming across violent police corruption and struggling to survive the day as she’s being hunted by both the crooked cops and residents of the astronomically underprivileged neighborhood she patrols, who understandably hate her guts simply because of her job and the race-based brutality it represents.
As such, Ealy (as he was in the Jacob’s Ladder reboot and Taylor’s camp offering The Intruder ) is denied any real persona, merely an excusable template of manhood being acted upon.
Michael Ealy ("Jacob's Ladder") stars as Derrick, a successful brand agent, whose marriage to Traci (Damaris Lewis, "BlacKkKlansman") has hit a rough patch.
The Intruder and Black and Blue carry strands of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and The Glass Shield (1994), respectively, and his latest returns once more to the world of “good” people under siege from sexy outsiders.
Director Deon Taylor works here with master cinematographer Dante Spinotti, who shot some of Michael Mann’s best films including “Heat” and “The Last of the Mohicans,” as well as Curtis Hanson’s “L.A. Confidential.”
Finally, veteran Dante Spinotti’s ( L.A. Confidential , The Last of the Mohicans ) cinematography is dazzling, the kinetic grace of his camera movements creating a visually visceral allure I was unquestionably drawn to.
Already an admirer of his work going back to “Slither” and working with James Gunn, to see what he does with THE INTRUDER is exciting.
Shoehorning social commentary into the action was another mistake - it's no Sicario - because this literally is a story where you need to cut to the chase.
Taylor implements an editing and scoring style of the 2015 film “ Sicario ,” which the filmmaker obviously (and sometimes blatantly) uses as a mood board.