Can a Fatal Attraction reboot recreate the ’80s classic magic?
LATE ONE RECENT Saturday night, I rewatched the classic ’80s psychosexual potboiler Fatal Attraction. Michael Douglas was exactly as oily and awful as I remembered from first time round, playing the archetypal midlife New York infidel, Don Gallagher, who is stalked by his one-night stand, a never better Glenn Close as the definitive femme fatale, Alex Forrest. Thirty-six years after its release, it was utterly amazing, start to finish.
The film is crammed full of incredible moments. An excruciating club scene. Don and Alex’s first mad tryst in an industrial lift shaft. Most famously, the boiling bunny. Rewatching, the broad, frenetic psychological scope of it felt brand new, like it had been made yesterday.
For reasons one can assume are to do with owning the franchise rights to the name of this stone cold classic, Paramount has remade and fleshed out the film into a TV series. The casting is promising. Joshua Jackson (PACEY!) steps into the shoes of our pants-down protagonist, Amanda Peet plays his wife Beth, while the brilliant Lizzy Caplan – last seen being one of the best things about Fleishman Is In Trouble – is Forrest, conspicuously free of Close’s magnificent perm.
We enter the story with Gallagher being given parole from prison for the crime we think we know he’s committed, the fatal bit of his attraction to Forrest. His daughter Alyssa, a key ingredient to the film as a child, is now grown up and studying Jungian philosophy – because why not? The story is told in flashback, exactly like another recent Paramount reboot of a classic, American Gigolo. However, a plethora of predictable reasons why Gallagher might have cheated on his wife – hitting his 40th birthday, missing a promotion at work – make the new story feel more old-fashioned than the original.
Fatal Attraction stands or falls on the heat of the couple at its centre. Douglas and Close sizzled on a tightrope, flip-flopping between base lust and livid recriminations. Jackson and Caplan, however, share a palpable lack of orchestrated chemistry. Something got lost in translation in those missing four decades between original and copy. Honestly? You might be better off rewatching the film.
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