Tyler Perry, the writer/director of the movie Tyler Perry’s Mea Culpa (2024), seems to have a target audience in mind. Perry tried to achieve this thriller element in the story with the legal thriller, erotic thriller, and psychological thriller subgenres. However, the analogy here is that of a return that promises excitement yet it is simply dull and uneventful. This is the case with this monotonous, featureless, and pathetic insult to people’s intelligence that does not classify itself as a movie but as a parody of a movie. Only the hilarious quips (and there are loads of them) make watching the movie even mildly pleasant.
There’s a sense in which Mea Culpa wouldn’t have received any attention had it not been promoted as heaved onto the landing page of Netflix. They’ll show up too because Perry’s name is so widely revered. But that is not justification for why there was a major drop in quality in Mea Culpa. To begin, Perry isn’t the best director, but Perry’s conception is what I discussing a truly dumb script, which is linked to the ridiculous plot, one dimensional characters, and brilliant dialogues.
Kelly Rowland receives the least award for the role of Mea Harper the criminal lawyer who is on the edge of a divorce. Kal (Sean Sagar), her husband, is an anesthesiologist who got sacked for coming in drunk. He may have also uh, slept with Mea. Further adding to the already complicated story is Kal’s bizarre and excessive obsession with his ailing and controlling mother, Azalia (Kerry O’Malley). It is a subplot of the narrative that unfolds rather poorly than intended.
While at her workplace in a law firm, Mea gets to meet a rather peculiar contemporary artist Zyair Malloy (a bone dry and lifeless Trevante Rhodes). He has been accused of murdering his girlfriend and is likely to be charged. The police have a mountain of evidence against him yet Zyair asserts he’s innocent. He intends to hire Mea whom he wants to represent him in court and after great deliberation, he consents to that. After all, he is unemployed so they could use the funds.
There’s a caveat with the character of Mea considering the high-profile case, which is Ray (Nick Sagar), the District Attorney and her brother in law, is planning to run for mayor and is ready to use Zyair’s conviction to campaign for it. Predictably, many family tensions escalate most of which start taking the stories to a different trajectory that is more rehearsed than shocking.
For them not to be photographed by the media, and also for convenient reasons, Mea starts going to Zyair’s loft and meeting him to discuss strategies concerning the case. But as usual, sex comes back faster than legal proceedings. There was not a whiff of any chemistry between the two lead characters Rowland and Rhodes, yet the repulsive sex fiend Zyair decided to woo what was purported to be an intelligent lady, Mea.
This brings out another concern that the film addresses. In every scenario, the so called fortified female character appears as thick as a plank. The absurd decisions she makes, her constant inability to recognize the clearly visible, her hopelessly bad instincts, and her overall judgment. The character of Mea, as the film goes on becomes unbelievably more and more dim witted. Which I doubt was what Perry wanted. But the material is so awful that it puts Rowland in a bind. There is simply such a narration whereby she can’t enact Mea the way Perry envisions.
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