Fatale movie review & film summary (2020)

Its most grievous sin of all, however, is the miscasting of Hilary Swank. As the jilted woman who drives the film’s busy and bloody plot, Swank is strangely subdued. With her cool, steely presence opposite a shmoozy and ambitious Michael Ealy, her performance never quite jells. Swank delivers her threats with a degree of menace that’s so understated, it’s borderline monotone. Sure, she eventually gets the opportunity to let loose with the fearless physicality that’s the two-time Oscar-winner’s trademark. But it makes you wonder what she’s doing here, and what kind of direction she received once she arrived.

First, though, we meet Ealy’s Derrick, a handsome and successful Los Angeles sports agent and former college basketball star. The always formidable Mike Colter co-stars as his best friend and business partner, Rafe, who’s pressuring him to sell the company they’ve built to the behemoth William Morris Endeavor and reap millions. Derrick, however, wants to keep control of what they’ve worked so hard to achieve and continue their focus on providing the most lucrative deals for their lineup of African-American clients. That’s an interesting idea and would have made for a more inventive movie—in the vein of Steven Soderbergh’s “High Flying Bird,” perhaps—but screenwriter David Loughery doesn’t have anything nearly so substantial or complex on his mind.

Derrick is married to the beautiful but distant Traci (Damaris Lewis), a real estate agent who’s suspiciously out late showing expensive properties from Hancock Park to Marina Del Rey. (She and Derrick live way up in the Hollywood Hills off Mulholland Drive. That’s a lot of driving.) At a friend’s Las Vegas bachelor party, Rafe urges Derrick to have a little extramarital fun at a nightclub, even going so far as to pull the wedding ring off his buddy’s finger.

Enter Swank’s Valerie, from an entirely different movie, it seems. From the first moment Derrick and Valerie meet at the bar and he accidentally spills a drink on her slinky dress, there’s a directness about Swank’s delivery that conflicts with Ealy’s steamy demeanor. It’s as if she’s taking this all seriously as an acting exercise. Ealy, meanwhile, co-starred for Taylor last year in the gleefully bonkers stalker thriller “The Intruder,” so he’s familiar with this territory.

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