Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * *

Cast: Rosario Dawson, Katherine Heigl, Geoff Stults, Cheryl Ladd, Whitney Cummings, Robert Wisdom, Isabella Kai Rice, Simon Kassianides, Jayson Blair, Marissa Morgan, Aline Elasmar.

It should be a refreshing take on an idea, the real life animosity that resides in the heart of a spurned ex-wife over the new woman in the man’s life, the lies, the sense of fragile and the broken manifesting itself as a potential weapon, of a rage boiling to its maximum, to the end point where the terrifying spectacle of what you see is the representation of all that can go wrong when women fight over a man. It is not the nicest thing on Earth to witness and it does leave you wondering exactly what women see in the opposite gender to make them go down the path of no return.

Make no illusions about this, the story of the spurned lover, the woman rejected, has been done before and with much finer integrity than Forgettable could offer, the whole film relying on the acting out of a script that really didn’t convey the very real animosity that exists in the sphere of female relationships when they give into the trait and emotion of jealousy. This raw emotion is not meant to be slick, powered down, it is meant to be the beginnings of rage, of unforgivable tension and despite the best efforts of Rosario Dawson and Katherine Heigl, there was none of this static charge, this feeling of bitterness and unhinged anger floating in the air. If anything, this quiet, collected unbalanced behaviour was performed with greater sense of distinguished grace by the indomitable Cheryl Ladd, who was a saving benevolence for the film.

What should have been a good film, a premise laid down with three hugely influential parts, the spurned wife, the dominant mother and the lover, instead turned out to be a basic affair, low on drama, devoid in parts of any type of sense of danger and growing threat, in the end it has the unfortunate effect of being a paperweight punch bag, one that you know has already been demolished a thousand times and stitched back together but without half its stuffing each time.

Forgettable rather sincerely lives up to its name, this is not a film in which the damage, the emotional thrust of how a woman’s mind can be affected by divorce, even if they were the cause of the proceedings and the split that followed, is truly followed through and in the end it is regrettable that the film is laid so low in its appearance as a finished product.

Ian D. Hall