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Unforgettable

6/10

Stars: Rosario Dawson, Katherine Heigl, Geoff Stults, Sarah Burns, Whitney Cummings, Simon Kassianides, Isabella Kai Rice, Robert Ray Wisdom, Alex Quijano, Cheryl Ladd

Director: Denise Di Novi

The title tells all.

Or does it?

Not here.

The chances of recalling anything much about De Novi’s eminently unmemorable directorial debut after a few days are pretty minute unless you have recently rebooted your memory or are just plain unfortunate.

But should you fancy an increasingly unlikely TV-movie style melodrama put across with all the credibility of a politician addressing potential voters during an election then, on its own increasingly daft over-acted, over-written-and-enthusiastically over-acted terns, it comes across painless no-strain-on-the brain fun and fury.

In the heyday of double features, Unforgettable would almost certainly have nestled as the bottom half of the bill, providing 100 minutes of painless second-feature entertainment.

Screenwriter Christina Hodson’s emotionally sweltering melodrama finds Dawson becoming engaged to divorced dad Stults and going to live with him, believing she has finally found heaven.

Unfortunately Stults’ ex-wife Heigl turns out to be the kind of psychopath who would give Norman Bates nightmares and, employing her ex-husband and their young daughter as weapons against Dawson, she begins a nightmare reign of terror and worse to reclaim her husband…

When you hear your fellow reviewers laughing at a movie that isn’t intended as a comedy you can usually be pretty certain that you’re are watching a horror movie (laughter is the routine critical cover for being frightened) – or, as here, something somewhat different.

De Novi who also doubles as producer, unexpectedly perhaps, elicits the enthusiastic larger-than-life performances from her leads that she needs to put the show across as engagingly as possible without leaving much of a trace in filmgoers’ grey cells.

Alan Frank

USA 2017. UK Distributor: Warner Brothers. Colour.
100 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 1, Violence/Horror 2, Drugs 1, Swearing 2.

Review date: 04 May 2017