Thriller proves to be forgettable
Unforgettable is one of those problematic Katherine Heigl movie titles, like Life As We Know It — is it a science documentary? — or One For the Money, which suggests advice from her agent. This one is in fact highly forgettable. A better name might have been Gone (Crazy) Girl or, to borrow a line from the screenplay, Psycho Barbie.
The plot, by Christina Hodson and David Johnson, is one of those every-woman’s-worst-nightmare scenarios. Julia (Rosario Dawson) has an abusive ex-boyfriend in her past, and starts a relationship with niceguy David (Geoff Stults), whose exwife, Tessa (Heigl), is evil.
You can tell she’s evil because Di Novi has swapped out the usual rom-com filter used to film Heigl, replacing it with a 35-mm evil lens. Also, she has an evil/crazy look in her eye, and does crazy/evil things like steal Julia’s phone and hack into her life. Even her wind chimes, inexplicably hung inside the house, sound evil. You don’t need a degree in psychology to come up with this stuff, although a course or two in screenwriting might have helped.
Anyway, the straight-ahead plot finds Tessa doing her best to mess with Julia’s head, while David remains conveniently off-screen, tending to his start-up brewery. There’s also a daughter from the first marriage, played by Abigail Breslin clone Isabella Kai Rice.
Cheryl Ladd also pops up as Tessa’s neurotic mom, as if to prove that it takes one damaged blonde to produce another. And Julia has a shrink and a couple of good friends that help drain what tension there is out of the movie; surely the idea with an effective thriller is to isolate the protagonist?
But Unforgettable isn’t an effective thriller. Di Novi uses creepy music and camera angles to represent honest emotion, and physical closeness between characters in place of any real connection. There’s little in the way of shocks or surprises and a final-scene sortof twist produced more groans than gasps from a recent preview audience. They seemed eager to forget the experience. Fortunately, that shouldn’t prove difficult.