‘Fatal Attraction’ Review: Joshua Jackson and Lizzy Caplan in a Paramount+ Remake That’s Not Worth Obsessing Over

The reshot ending of Adrian Lyne’s 1987 Fatal Attraction is one of the most successful blunders in Hollywood history.

Sure, turning Glenn Close’s scorned Alex Forrest into a nearly unkillable slasher villain undermined anything that was thematically interesting about the character and the movie. But it also produced a rousing climax that left bloodthirsty audiences cheering and helped make Fatal Attraction a blockbuster.

The conclusion so violated the setup of James Dearden’s script that it isn’t a surprise we’re being treated to a long-form re-conception of Fatal Attraction; it’s a surprise that it took so long.

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“There’s only one way for something to end,” Alex (Lizzy Caplan) asserts in the eighth and final episode of Paramount+‘s Fatal Attraction. “There’s only one decision to make. How are you going to get to that ending?” 

Unfortunately, for all of that certitude, the new ending offers no improvement over Lyne’s ruthlessly efficient original and the bloated journey to get there is rarely more satisfying. Despite several exceptional performances, this Fatal Attraction can’t find the desired middle ground between voyeuristic thrills and psychological nuance, and despite many enticing options, it can’t plant its flag in any important piece of the zeitgeist. 

Oh, and no bunnies are harmed in this production of Fatal Attraction, which I’ll leave for you to interpret as a positive or negative.

Series developers Alexandra Cunningham and Kevin J. Hynes have moved things to Los Angeles (or to cheap soundstages, with some Los Angeles establishing shots) and bifurcated the narrative. 

In the present day, Dan Gallagher (Joshua Jackson) is paroled after serving 15 years for killing Alex Forrest. Having had his professional fortunes, family and hair destroyed by his incarceration, Dan tries to reconnect with daughter Ellen (Alyssa Jirrels), while teaming with his investigator buddy Mike (Toby Huss) to clear his name of a murder he insists he didn’t commit.

Back in 2008-ish, we see Dan approaching his 40th birthday as a man who seemingly has everything. He’s a fast-riser in the district attorney’s office with a judgeship possibly in his immediate future. He has a beautiful and endlessly patient wife in Amanda Peet’s Beth. Then, in a rare down moment, he meets Alex, who does vague things for the city’s victim services department. They flirt over shared pet peeves and meatballs and margaritas, and soon they’re bopping on her studio apartment’s kitchen island. For Dan, it’s a lapse in judgment. For Alex, it’s a break in the pervasive isolation she feels in a new city. Things soon get obsessive and, inevitably, deadly.

News of this remake was greeted with a predictably banal gnashing of teeth in the, “Oh gee, I bet they’re going to make Dan the bad guy because he’s a successful white man and turn Alex into a victim!” vein. This is easily dismissible on two counts. The first is that if you go back and watch the original movie, Michael Douglas’ Dan is a total putz. Eventually Alex over-escalates and it’s no longer what Dan deserves, but for a long time? He’s a dummy.

More simply, though, the new Fatal Attraction is not out to get Dan Gallagher. Yes, he’s depicted as a paragon of white privilege, a nepobaby who was handed his job and, even when he stumbles, has never experienced a consequence in his life. But if we accept his claim that he didn’t kill Alex, the one consequence he did end up facing was disproportionate. He’s a dummy, but he’s not a villain.

Nor is this Fatal Attraction out to fully redeem Alex. In Caplan’s capable hands, she’s a more sympathetic character. But for all that the series wants to be sensitive and empathetic in its depiction of what is more clearly a recognizable mental illness, the escalation remains disproportionate. She’s a victim in her own narrative, but in the series, she’s still the villain.

If it sounds like this Fatal Attraction wants to have it both ways, it absolutely does. It’s full of nods to the movie that range from tiny (Alex likes black leather, if not quite the movie’s black leather trenchcoat) to blatant (Alex really doesn’t like being ignored) to silly (I said no rabbits were harmed, but darned if they didn’t shoehorn rabbits into the show anyway), but at the same time it thinks it’s superior to the movie’s non-stop adrenaline rush.

That means that after a certain point, the series stops trying to be shocking or thrilling or sexy — the kitchen bopping is limited to a single episode and limited in its eroticism as well — and instead tries to do flimsy intellectual work around the skeleton of the story. There’s a full trial, complete with so many logical gaffes I could only giggle. There’s an episode dedicated primarily to Alex’s backstory, and while I don’t want to spoil any revelations, I’ll hint that her problem predictably rhymes with “schmaddy schmissues.” And, worst of all, Ellen is a psychology student and spends one episode after another listening to class lectures on Jung that invariably exactly parallel what we’ve been learning about Dan and Alex. One character even has to say out-loud that there are similarities between “that shadow stuff” Ellen is studying and the stuff in her life.

For all of the new material, Fatal Attraction has precious little to say about its modern context. Dan facing consequences isn’t, finally, a commentary on cancel/consequence culture. Making theirs into a workplace affair doesn’t, finally, give #MeToo shadings to the Dan/Alex dynamic. Mike has a whole monologue on the flaws in the legal system and the criminal rehabilitation process, but I don’t think that’s what this Fatal Attraction is about either. And although it’s mentioned that in 2023, “murder is a brand” that fascinates people, there’s little connection to our insatiable true crime appetites — which is odd given that Cunningham created the more perceptive Dirty John anthology.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t positives to the fleshing out of this narrative. 

Caplan is a combustible delight in the showy role that earned Close one of her Oscar nominations. She’s scary, but never in a way that becomes cartoonish, and infuses the character with a potent loneliness. 

Peet, so good in the second of those Dirty John seasons, and especially Jirrels are very good at capturing the wreckage and reconstruction of the life Dan tore to pieces. I actually have always watched the movie pondering the impact of all of that trauma on little Ellen. Would that the answer wasn’t mostly a gravitation toward Wikipedia summaries of Jungian archetypes.

Best of all is Huss, who is funnier and yet more authentic than anything around him in a glorified “best friend” role that he elevates into something fully watchable. The 2023 scenes where Huss’ Mike and the newly released Dan become Odd Couple-style roomies are Jackson’s best moments as well. Otherwise, I kept wondering why the hair and makeup team was being so mean to him and why, after spending years on a more layered exploration of infidelity (Showtime’s The Affair), the actor wanted to force those comparisons here.

Circling back around to endings, without specifically spoiling anything, I’ll say that the new Paramount+ Fatal Attraction has two endings: one dumb and anticlimactic, the other ridiculous and silly. I could work to justify the first ending on emotional terms and the second on pop psychology terms. It still wouldn’t be enough to make the show worthwhile.