Rent Unforgettable (2017)

Unforgettable (aka To Have and to Hold) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

I’m not such a stuck-up critic that I can’t enjoy a trashy thriller on the same level of the drunken female audience at the preview screening. I’ve seen enough bad films in my time to appreciate such filth on its level of guilty-pleasure entertainment fit for parties. I sat down and prepared to laugh my butt off at a picture where two women would eventually slice at each other in the violent climax. But a strange feeling came over me as I watched the two leads of Rosario Dawson and Katherine Heigl build towards this finale. It was dread. I didn’t want to see Dawson and Heigl in trash because they are playing these roles up with more class and dedication that is required. Is it wrong to wish that the actors were worse to enjoy a film more?

Dawson is as likable and powerful as he ever was in a role where she plays a woman trying to leave her old life behind with a new man in her life. She hopes that she can be his wife someday and be a great mom for his daughter. The only problem is that pesky and prim ex-wife of his played by Heigl, doling out the crazy mind games and evil stares towards Dawson. I was so surprised to discover how strong Heigl was in a role that I’ve seen her play before. She is perfectly suited to playing a crazy woman that deceptively tries to edge Dawson out of her life. Too perfect, in fact. I would think that if anybody could take a role and amp it up with laughable levels of insanity, it would be her. But, no, Heigl had to choose this script of all her movies to prove how she can be a good actress.

The mind games she stages are pretty genius for such a villain. She sets up a fake Facebook account to track Dawson’s abusive ex-lover and convince him that she still wants such a violent man back in her life. She meets with Dawson and whips up stories about her sex life to plant seeds of jealousy. And she always seems to find the right moment to pop up and manipulate Dawson’s new man further into distrust. For a few scenes, I started to believe this could be a better movie.

But I knew this wasn’t meant to be. The moment where Dawson has passionate sex in the bathroom and Heigl pleasures herself in a Facebook chat is when the movie finally travels down the familiar trail of trashiness. And it’s that moment where the movie became more depressing when it should have been fun. For the final act, the movie becomes the typical rollercoaster of Dawson versus Heigl in absurd situations. This is silly and I should be enjoying the ridiculous scenes where the two of them battle with fire pokers and knives. And yet I couldn’t help but think of what the movie had been like if it were a more capable thriller. Maybe there would be a better story with the daughter and her dad rather than them being used as mere pawns, stepping aside when the battle commences and refusing to play a part.

I don’t care if this sentence has already been written a dozen times: Unforgettable isn’t worthy of its title. Even by the time the movie reaches it’s more absurd scene of a stinger that implies a ludicrous sequel, I just wasn’t in the mood for such crazy. If this film truly wanted to be a trashy thriller, it needs to go the full nine yards of crazy. It may sound strange, but this movie would actually have been better if it had the guts to be worse.