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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