An erotic thriller that’s as titillating as drying paint turns up the heat on Netflix

The erotic thriller subgenre lives and dies by two very obvious elements: there has to be at least some degree of eroticism, and a thrill or two. If a project fails to deliver on those fronts, then you find yourself calling its very existence into question.

Sadly, we must bring Fatale into the conversation, because it’s about as sexually-charged as a phone call with your grandmother, and every bit as thrilling to boot. A facsimile of a thousand better films, Michael Ealy stars as a successful sports agent who finds himself caught in a web of entanglement brought on by his misguided dalliance with Hilary Swank’s dogged detective. That’s “dogged,” just to make things clear.

Sometimes stories about misdeeds, adultery, and obsession can be so ludicrous that they turn out to be either hilarious or entertaining completely by accident, but Fatale is not that sort of tale. It’s just kind of there, floating around in the ether of cinematic eroticism, but too afraid to remove the bathrobe and show what it’s really got to the world.

However, that hasn’t stopped it from making a surprising run up the Netflix most-watched list, as per FlixPatrol. In fact, Fatale has gone right ahead and thrust itself right into the Top 20, where it’s looking to maintain a rock hard position on the charts in the hope that it’ll finish spectacularly by the end of the week.