Perfect Addiction (MA15+, 107 minutes)
2 stars.
Back in my day, silly ultra-soft-core dramas like Two Moon Junction and Nine and a Half Weeks made good money at the box office and made a flogging on home video, where people could rewind and pause the sexy action in the privacy of their own homes.
This new Amazon Prime release Perfect Addiction honours the spirit of those films, in that like those films it's not great, but it is occasionally pretty sexy if you don't think too much about its characters' messed-up psychology.
Like the recent successful After We Collided/After We Fell film series, which started their life as sexy One Direction fan fiction on the online writers site Wattpad, the source material for Perfect Addiction was loaded onto that same website by author Claudia Tan, finding a massive 85 million strong readership.
The film's decent performances and high production values elevate it beyond the quality of the writing.
Quiet community college student Sienna (Kiana Madeira) earns a living training Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters in the gym of her father-figure Julian (Manu Bennett).
In the film's early minutes Sienna has helped promising fighter Jax (Matthew Noszka) become an underground fight success, fallen in love with him, and then been there to pick up the pieces when this leather jacket-wearing bad boy crashes his motorbike and breaks his leg.
Sienna nurses Jax back onto his feet and helps him train in some new technique that will keep him an MMA champion, working around some of the limitations left behind by his bike accident.
What does Jax do to repay Sienna for her time and devotion? He of course starts shagging Sienna's younger sister Beth (Bree Winslow) while gaslighting Sienna for forcing him to do it by always being away working to pay his medical bills.
Wiping the two of them from her life means leaving the apartment the three were living in, and fortunately Sienna's college friend Brent (Nicholas Duvernay) has a brother with a spare room going cheap.
It turns out the brother, Kayden (Ross Butler), is also an MMA fighter, and still being quite the bitter Betty, Sienna offers to train Kayden to be a better fighter than Jax, exchanging her coaching skills for free rent.
But one thing leads to another, as it usually does, and Sienna and Kayden fall in love, which puts an additional layer of complications on Kayden and Jax's big underground MMA showdown.
The three lead performers aren't bad in their roles, though there are some questionable editorial choices with a bit of cutting-away to the character listening to the dialogue rather than the character saying it, which has me wondering if some of the performances sounded better than they looked.
Ross Butler is a rising star, and is in fact one of the Shazam! siblings currently on the big screen in Shazam!: Fury of the Gods.
Noszka comes off the worse of the three leads, but possibly only because his character is such a snarling bad boy, which you can tell from his tattoos and his black leather motorcycle jacket. Did I say that the source material for this was online fan fiction?
Madeira was in the Netflix trilogy Fear Street. She is a good performer doing her best with some questionable dialogue from Stephanie Sanditz and Claudia Tan's screenplay.
The film was shot in Poland though set mostly in interiors, and it was produced and funded by German studio Constantin Film, who have an eye for profitable content.
The film catches your eye on the Amazon Prime list of new releases, probably because it pays homage to the graphic design for the old Glenn Close-Michael Douglas potboiler Fatal Attraction.
Director Castille Landon, who directed some of those After Ever films, loves a montage - Sienna training Jax, Sienna training Kayden, Sienna kissing Jax, et cetera et cetera. Perhaps they should have called this film Perfect Montage.
