Poor Katherine Heigl has been typecast as the uptight blond (think the unfortunate trifecta of Knocked Up, 27 Dresses and The Ugly Truth). Here, she at least has fun with that typecasting as tightly wound and sleekly coiffed troublemaker Tessa. A Bay Area psycho Barbie, Tessa is determined to make life difficult for her beer-brewing, rent-a-hunk, ex-husband’s (Geoff Stults) new girlfriend, Julia (a heroic Rosario Dawson, playing it as straight as the hammy script will allow). Enjoyable, too, is the inversion of the black best friend trope, with Julia’s supportive, zany bestie played by Whitney Cummings of 2 Broke Girls.
Movie super-producer Denise Di Novi’s directorial debut casts itself as an erotic thriller in the tradition of Fatal Attraction; to me, it had more in common with Frank Perry’s 1981 melodrama Mommie Dearest. We see Heigl’s villainess vaping, chatting on Facebook messenger and searching for strangers’ records on “backgroundprobe.com” in the dark, her only company an enormous glass of wine. This is deliberately silly and knowing satire and I hope it becomes a camp classic.
