Broken Vows

Bram Coppens – 2016 – USA

I guess it’s futile to bash a movie like this.  Nobody can expect much going into it, as it is so clearly a carbon copy of every bad cautionary tale of casual sex ever made.  There have often been thrillers about disturbed stalkers, of course – such as Strangers on a Train (1951) or The Collector (1965) – but it was really Fatal Attraction (1987) that turned the sub-genre into an everlasting stream of straight-to-video “erotic thrillers” all cut from the same cloth.  In New Orleans for a bachelorette party, a bride-to-be gets seduced by a sexy bartender and by the next morning is already on the run from his psychotic clinginess.  The rest writes itself, (although it did actually take two to pen this script).  The whole cast is pretty lousy under the hack direction of Bram Coppens, even, strangely, star Wes Bentley, who has not only been great in other movies but has even played this exact role before, in P2 (2007), but for some reason he comes off really bad.