Well that was fast

Amanda Seyfried completely au naturel in “Chloe”

Chloe with newly naked Amanda Seyfried made less than $2 million worldwide ... but cost $11 million to make. I guess it’s no surprise that it’s already out on DVD. And on the web.

What went wrong?

I blame Hollywood’s fixation with “reimagining”, myself.

Why? Because apparently no one can “reimagine” any story as anything other than a variation of Dragonslayer:

Establish a problem that can be solved by killing something or someone;
Kill it;
Roll credits.

Mia Wasikowska posing for “Alice in Wonderland”

Alice in chainmail. Can’t wait for the sword-swinging reimagining of Charlotte’s Web.

Worked well for Tim Burton’s reimagined Alice in Wonderland — insofar as it hinged all of ~~Wonderland’s~~ Underland’s problems on the deterrent presence of the Jabberwocky, slew the Jabberwocky in an epic CGI battle ripped right from The Lord of the Rings, and thereby ended the tyranny of Helena Bonham-Carter. Problem + solution = happy movie-goer, even in a completely unnecessary rehash like Alice in Wonderland.

But Chloe director Atom Egoyan, having already reimagined the script from the French film Nathalie..., apparently loved the formula so much that he couldn’t wait the requisite 10+ years to turn Chloe into Dragonslayer, and reimagined the story right in the middle of the movie.

Yes, after posing the question, “What do you do when the spark’s gone out of your marriage and your charismatic husband’s life is more fun than yours and overflowing with college-age tail?”, Egoyan seems to feel that enough time has already passed in the first half of the film that a re-reimagining is in order. The original problem is shelved — I guess there’s no real solution — and Seyfried’s Chloe repurposed psycho ex machina to be a dragon in need of slaying.

The problem is that she isn’t the dragon, the one whose death will solve everything. Or anything, other than Chloe’s comparatively mild meddling. (Chloe’s answer to Fatal Attraction’s rabbit-boiling scene: Chloe has sex with Julianne Moore’s teenage son. The fiend!) The apparent happy ending we get really only ends a chapter within the movie, not the whole movie itself.

Amanda Seyfried prefers to boink her rabbits before boiling them, from “Chloe”

And not for nothing, but as dragons go, Seyfried is a little weak in Chloe. Part of that is Seyfried herself — while she may have many assets (and those were her assets, by the way, not a body double’s), a strong screen presence is not one of them. But most of the problem is the shallow writing — Chloe’s motivations seem dictated more by the needs of the plot than by her character.

In the end, it would have been much better for Egoyan and company if Chloe had gone straight to DVD. Not that it matters to anyone else: box office bomb or not, Seyfried’s message that “they’re real, they’re spectacular, and they’re ready to work” will still be disseminated to the DVD-renting and web-trolling public, and we, the DVD-renting, web-trolling public, will have finally gotten to see in the privacy of our own homes what we’ve been aching to see ever since Seyfried’s mouse-ear-wearing, weather-predicting performance in Mean Girls.

And that, surely, is a satisfactory happy ending for all concerned.