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12:05 PM / Thursday March 28, 2024

23 Jan 2020

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January 23, 2020 Category: Entertainment Posted by:

Tyler Perry’s latest movie, “A Fall From Grace”, lands with a thud. And that’s just the hair and makeup.

By Denise Clay

A few months back, Oscar-winning actress and comedian Mo’Nique sued the streaming giant Netflix for discrimination because the company offered her a mere $500,000 for her to do a stand-up special for them. 

She claims in her suit that Netflix discriminates against Black women in comedy, lowballing them while giving millions to Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Amy Schumer, who, if we’re really honest with ourselves, is about as funny as toenail fungus.

Once upon a time, I thought that Mo’Nique had lost her mind filing that lawsuit. Going up against a site that gives folks like Ava DuVernay, Shonda Rhimes, Kerry Washington, and other Black women producing powerhouse content big bucks to do it looked like career suicide to me.

But on Monday, I watched “A Fall From Grace,” the first offering from one of Netflix’s newest content producers, “filmmaker” and studio head, Tyler Perry. 

I owe Mo’Nique an apology. In fact, we all do. I say this because if Netflix paid Tyler Perry 50 cents for this two-hour, steaming pile of nonsense, Mo’Nique should have gotten an offer from the company for more than $500,000. 

If she doesn’t use this perfect storm of bad acting, bad writing and bad makeup as “Exhibit A” in her lawsuit against Netflix, Mo’Nique needs to find new lawyers.

The film tells the story of Grace Waters (Crystal Fox), a divorced, bank executive who’s just trying to make sense of her life now that her son is married, and her husband is living in the house they used to share with his secretary.

Now because this is a Tyler Perry movie, and Grace is a college-educated woman with a high-powered job, we meet her in jail. She’s accused of killing her much-younger husband Shannon (Mehcad Brooks) for stealing from the bank she worked in, cheating on her, and otherwise being a classic Tyler Perry cad. They met when her best friend Sarah (Phylicia Rashad) gave her an invitation to an art exhibit opening and told her she needed to get out more.

Grace wants to plead guilty, so Rory, the head of the Public Defenders office (Perry taking a page out of Spike Lee’s book and appearing in every movie he directs) sends Jasmine Bryant (Brescia Webb), a newbie lawyer who’s already burned out and has never tried a case, to make the deal.

But after hearing Grace’s tale of heartbreak, talking with her friend Sarah, and, and I’m not kidding, looking at how the blood pooled in the area where Grace dragged her scheming, lying husband once she took a bat and went all Bryce Harper upside his head with it, she decides to fight for her. 

Now I’ll start with the good news. Unlike just about every other movie Perry has made that wasn’t “For Colored Girls”, I didn’t see the ending coming. Without getting into too much detail, the mystery gets solved when Jasmine comes to Sarah’s house to commiserate about Grace’s case and meets an older woman (Cecily Tyson) who is trying to run away and brings her back indoors. I’ve got to give Perry an A for effort on that.

But the bad news is, while Perry put a lot of effort into the idea, he put no effort into anything else. 

In an interview with Variety, Webb, Rashad and Fox told the interviewer that the film was shot in five days.

It looks it.

From the master class in bad acting by extras (the actress romancing the camera and a actor eating air so conspicuously you can see it in the diner where Grace and Shannon are having their first date particularly stand out) to the hairpieces (did Perry really mean for Brooks to look like Jermaine Jackson in that wig?!) to the makeup (I felt badly for Angela Marie Rigsby, who portrays another public defender. The makeup on her face was so dark that it looked like a mask and didn’t match the rest of her body), the slapped together nature of this whole production was on full display.

And if I’m Tyler Perry, I’m going to stop bragging about writing all of my own scripts if for no other reason but you managed to create the single worst police officer in cinematic history. Just how many sets of handcuffs did Jordan Bryant (Matthew Law) go through as he left handcuffed suspects to his own devices? I wondered after a while if the city had his own line item for just his handcuffs.  

In any case, I know that I’ve made a whole lot of you mad with this review of “A Fall From Grace” because I’ve already had the arguments with some of you on social media. I understand that Perry deserves his props for having his own studio and building it from the ground up, but when you have your own studio, you control the content. 

You don’t need to slap a movie together in five days.

You can hire people who know how to write.

You can hire hair and makeup people that can keep people from being so distracted by how your actors look.

You can do better by your audience.

Probably the best assessment of this movie came from my fiancé, SUN sports writer Chris Murray, who I owe a really nice dinner for sitting through “A Fall From Grace” with me.

He said, “This movie doesn’t deserve to be rated by Rotten Tomatoes; it deserves to be hit with them!”

You’re welcome, Mo’Nique. You’re welcome.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the article belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, The Philadelphia Sunday SUN, the author’s organization, committee or group or individual.

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