"Fatal Affair" (Review)

*******Spoiler Alert*******

In this edition of "90 minutes of my life I can't get back," "Fatal Affair" is.... terrible LOL. If you don't know what I'm talking about, thank your lucky stars, but it's a Netflix Original movie starring Omar Epps, Nia Long and Stephen Bishop. Now if you know anything about these actors and their bodies of work, you'd expect a lot from the flick. That is until you come to know the plot of the movie, which is anything but original.

What is it about terrible reviews that make you wanna watch a movie to see just how bad it is? I actually don't think it's got as much to do with the reviews as it does FOMO. If everyone is talking about something, you naturally are drawn toward it, just wanting to be in the know. Maybe these people aren't sophisticated enough to appreciate it, right? I mean, I've definitely found that to be the case sometimes when I've heard mixed reviews, but I have seen absolutely no one have anything good to say about this one. But it's Omar Epps, Nia Long and friggin Stephen Bishop! How bad could it really be?

Chile....LOL

First of all, how many more movies are we gonna get where there's some obsessed person - woman or man - who is such a delusional psychopath that they're just willing to kill everybody to get to the object of their desire, believing that person really wants to be with them despite their insistence to be left alone? I contend that there's just not a lot of ways to do that plot in any interesting, different way than has been done 99,000 times before, but this movie didn't even try. I legit got flashbacks of Michael Ealy, Dean Cain, and the fucken guy whose name I can't remember for the life of me who is the nut job in countless Lifetime movies. Oh, D.W. Moffet - I'm convinced that motherfucker is crazy in real life LOL. This movie even duplicated a lot of the same scenes - like the one where someone hears a noise and walks toward it, being redirected by a microwave or tea kettle or some shit just before they approach the corner the bad guy is lurking behind with a knife. Give me a break!

Now let's talk about Nia Long. Beautiful, sexy? Yes. But I never thought she was much of an actress. The characters she played in her previous roles weren't really stretched that far and I still found her mediocre, so it should be no surprise in this role, I was not impressed. Like AT ALL. She was giving me all the Mariska Hargitay in the world, and if you've watched Law & Order SVU over the years, you HAVE to know what I'm talking about. I've often wondered if she had a stroke at some point in the last few years because she not only looks a little distorted in the face, but her response time on lines is notably slower and disjointed emotionally from what we would deem to be natural, and what we saw from her in earlier years. It oddly comes off as a disinterest, or like someone who has been out of the game for decades and came back with a fraction of the confidence they once had. Nia is still beautiful and sexy but she definitely checks the latter box. Her tone throughout the movie just seemed glaringly flat. Even her sex scenes sucked, but in fairness, all the sex scenes sucked LOL. I'm not even gonna get into the scenes that were just unrealistic, but trust, there were several.

I'm honestly just baffled at how a movie could be this bad in 2020. There's an obvious blueprint for this one and they didn't even follow that well. Even the tittle was bunk - "Fatal Affair" and there wasn't even an affair. Netflix [likely] paid somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars for this? At least tens of thousands. WTF am I doing with my life??

Lovebirds, on the other hand, is funny af. Watch that instead.