Sunday 29 March 2020

A Fall From Grace (2020) - Movie Review



Well… since I’m still in isolation, looks like I’ll have to subside my hunger with VOD and streaming. Not entirely sure why I decided to go with this release in particular, but now that I have a better idea in my head about who Tyler Perry even is as a creative, I feel like I can approach this with more certainty than I did A Madea Family Funeral. See, when Tyler actively sets out to make a comedy, his weak-ass sense of character and comedic timing makes the more overwrought, melodramatic aspects shine through more so than the supposed selling point. But when he tries to make a thriller, you start to wonder why he ever had trouble making people laugh.

The story of a woman on trial for murdering her husband, its general ‘woman abused/generally screwed over by a man’ trappings make it pretty part-and-parcel for what Tyler Perry likes to think is his more serious side. What initially threw me off was that, for the most part, the acting is actually pretty decent. Crystal Fox as the titular Grace hits the right notes of naivete and tragedy, Mehcad Brooks as her suitor starts out aggressively charming (which, given what happens later, was a pretty crucial thing to get right), and while Bresha Webb as Grace’s lawyer is a bit of a wet blanket, she does just well enough to make those around her look even better.

However, these people are acting in highly sub-standard conditions. As in the bulk of the filming for this thing got done in only five days, and holy hell, does the end result look like it. Some of the post-production is also a bit iffy, like the inconsistent and scratchy sound mixing, but looking at the scenes on their own, it couldn’t feel more like a rush-job if it tried. Whether it’s the little things, like seeing extras take full glasses of wine to their lips but are only mime drinking, to the bigger things, like the frantic pacing (which itself is odd, with how padded out with unnecessary repetition these scenes often are), it all builds up to a really shaky foundation.

But as the supposed drama continues to unfold, and Tyler shows more and more insistence that his work be treated seriously, the more unintentionally hilarious it becomes. The delivery from the actors jumps right into the embarrassingly histrionic, the plot details don’t unravel as much as they mutate into what edgelords think ‘dark storytelling’ is, and the trial scenes we get where Grace’s lawyer is trying to defend her client? I genuinely can’t tell if her incompetence is an actual character trait, or if it’s just Tyler’s disconnected writing at work once again, because it’s not every film that shows the supposed good guy employing the ‘nitpick the hell out of every little detail’ tactic usually reserved for the obvious villain in legal stories like this.

And as a result of all that, I found myself giggling at this a lot more than I did with Funeral, and having seen Tyler Perry’s dichotomy first-hand, I can now officially declare him one of the most bass-ackward filmmakers working today. It’s such a delirious hack job, with such a gradual decline from ‘passable’ to ‘what in the actual ass-fuck were these people thinking?’ that I’d almost recommend it for a bad movie night. But bear in mind that, giggles or no giggles, this is still quite painful to sit through from a pure craft standpoint.

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