The dangerous actions of Katherine Heigl against her ex-husband and new girlfriend, make her ‘Unforgettable’. Tessa Connover (Katherine Heigl) is barely coping with the end of her marriage when her ex-husband, David (Geoff Stults), becomes happily engaged to Julia Banks (Rosario Dawson)—not only bringing Julia into the home they once shared but also into the life of their daughter, Lilly (Isabella Rice). Trying to settle into her new role as a wife and a stepmother, Julia believes she has finally met the man of her dreams, the man who can help her put her own troubled past behind her. But Tessa’s jealousy soon takes a pathological turn until she will stop at nothing to turn Julia’s dream into her ultimate nightmare. Unforgettable is directed by longtime producer, first time director, Denise Di Novi, and is rated PG-13 for scenes of violence and some adult language.

Ever since Fatal Attraction, Hollywood has gathered the idea that female audiences will rush to the film to see the newest of obsessive lover angles, a subgenre that I have created myself for the overabundance of offerings that this setup has unleashed. Over the last few years, films like No Good Deed, The Perfect Man, Obsessed, When the Bough Breaks, and The Boy Next Door are just a few of the suffocating masses that this critic has had to endure, but Unforgettable may take the crashing depths to new lows. For a title as polarizing as this one, this movie better be good for setting itself up for the butt of jokes with clever critics everywhere. But Di Novi’s first directing effort shows the young lady has a lot to learn not only with plausible scenarios, but also in tone-deaf attitude for her film that occasionally takes itself far too seriously. The one positive that I can say for every movie on the list that I named a second ago is that they are all incredibly self-aware for the stories that they are trying to tell. This kind of genre is cheap trash at its finest, and should be treated as such. There’s nothing remotely memorable about this chapter in the obsessive lover genre, and that is perhaps its biggest misconception.

For starters, we are treated to the latest in foreshadowing intros that gives away more than desired for anyone looking forward to 95 minutes of intriguing developments. For anyone who knows me, you know I detest foreshadowing scenes in the modern age of film because very few know how to do it without spoiling important details. For Unforgettable, we are treated to two co-plots in the film. The first is the obvious with the Mother versus the stepmother, and the second is the past of Rosario Dawson’s character coming back to haunt her. Julia was the victim of an abusive boyfriend, and that intro gives away important aspects to the finale of the movie ninety minutes before it rightfully should. This isn’t the only misfire in direction however, as we learn midway through the movie an aspect to these characters that doesn’t quite add up to the setup in this story. MINOR SPOILER – Tessa cheated on David and that is the reason why he left her. The problem with that is it makes sense and doesn’t put Tessa as the disadvantaged. She screwed herself over by cheating on her husband, so why care so much to get him back? Is it a possible scenario? Yes, but I think this story would work better if David plotted the action against her, or even that Julia was the woman that David cheated on Tessa with. Can you imagine the personal nature of that story?

Then there’s the huge plot holes that shows you the attention to detail that the film has for itself. There is an important phone hacking that happens early on in the movie that comes back to wrongfully accuse a character, and this has to be the dumbest police department that I have ever had the pleasure of viewing on-screen. Apparently this department finds it incapable of checking the I.P address of where the texts were coming from, or even checking the phone itself of the accused to see if her data matches that of what was typed. 21st century, movie, follow me here. If you are like me and love to notice continuity errors, you will also notice that during the ending a character gets hit from behind across the head with a fire poker. What’s funny about this is that he has a huge cut on his forehead when we see him turn around. That’s some fire poker, I tell you. I also love a search engine in a movie, where you can type in a name at common as Michael Vargas in Los Angeles, and only come up with one answer. Thankfully, it was the right person that this character was looking for, or the conversation of persuading him to come and have sex with the typer would be extremely awkward.

The pacing is at least harmless, even if it could afford to shave ten minutes or so with how much about the story we are spoiled to from the get-go. This is a movie that does float by accordingly, but the first hour does still surprise me for how very little this movie indulges in itself to be the kind of film that women can gossip about for hours after. The stuff that we came to see doesn’t happen until the final half hour, and before that we are treated to every obvious setup that this film has borrowed from other, better films to relay just how deranged this character is. What I could’ve used was a slower degenerating process on the character of Heigl’s. There’s never really any kind of slow transformation to pinpoint exactly when the worst of it got the best of her, so this story stays competently one-dimensional at all times.

There’s very little to rave about on the performances or characters outside of the work of Dawson herself. There was a definite taste in my mouth while watching this that this is an actress who knows she is too good for the kind of story, but the possibility to star in her own movie was one that was too good to pass up. I almost wish she did. Julia is at least the strongest written character in the movie, battling through a troubled past that has her mind every bit as fragile as her female antagonist. That is the single aspect about the movie that worked for me, and could’ve used a little more teasing to play up if what Julia is seeing is really going on inside of her head. Katherine Heigl isn’t an actress who I have a problem with, but outside of her haunting eyes, there’s very little weight or intimidation to her performance here. It all reeks of an actress playing against type for the first time, and it sent me back to the days of Malicious, in which Molly Ringwald played the same character that Heigl now saunters through. The biggest waste however, is in that of Geoff Stults as David. A character so void of intellectual ability that he finds himself constantly ignoring all that Tessa does wrong. If he’s this infatuated with her still, then why not get back together with her? It’s clear that he has enough nice things to say. My biggest problem with this character is ultimately it’s not how divorced parents act in the majority. Thankfully Stults is really just table dressing for the main course. I believe you could get any male actor to come in here and sleep through half of the job that he does. An early contender for Biggest Braindead Character of 2017.

In general, Unforgettable supplies its critics with enough ammunition for the jokes aimed at its unwise title. The problem with this film isn’t that I wish to forget it, but that I never saw it in the first place. Denise Di Novi’s debut effort is wrong on nearly every end of the spectrum, but most of all because it forgets to turn trash into treasure by embracing the campy vibes to live up to said title, a concept that shouldn’t be difficult for the same country that made Adam Sandler rich. There’s too much conventionalism to never play into the true asinine of this particular plot, lacking effective storytelling to get the blood pumping.

3/10