A Fantastic Woman (2017)

Score: 4.5 / 5

We open on a man named Orlando, getting a massage and wandering around Chile apparently on a mission. He enters a nightclub and his eyes connect with a singer onstage, who returns his gaze. She's notably younger than he, but it's clear the two are in love. That night, they have sex in their high-rise with a breathtaking view -- have sex, I should say, against the wall of windows -- but in the middle of the night, Orlando wakes in pain, suffers an aneurysm, and falls down a staircase.

It's at this point that Marina, the woman, becomes the protagonist, and the film chronicles her journey through grief. She hurries Orlando to the hospital, where he dies, and there she is interrogated and treated like a criminal not because of the bruises on Orlando's body but because she's transgender.

Her story is filled with complex characters and surprising revelations. Some people care for her and want to help her, such as her boss, her friends Wanda and Gaston, and Orlando's brother Gabo. Others help her but are forced by transphobic culture to further alienate her, especially the detective investigating possible sexual assault. And, of course, there are those who insult her with their contempt and loathing, such as Orlando's previous wife and son who try to take back Orlando's apartment and keep Marina away from the funeral.

While the movie is in many ways a hot-topic film, it staunchly refuses to exploit its leading woman and skillfully avoids the pitfalls of, for example, The Danish Girl. What we have here is a hardcore character study of someone who just happens to be trans. THIS is the kind of film that should be praised and studied for its radical importance, far more than the deeply problematic Love, Simon.

Daniela Vega plays Marina without any knowing humor or performative flair -- all the more important because Marina is, in fact, a performer -- which makes this film feel utterly honest. I never once doubted the reality of what I was seeing on screen. Even when the film flies into some mild fantasy, it's grounded and visceral. At one point as she walks down a sidewalk, the wind grows so strong she has to fall against it to stay standing; in a dreamlike nightclub sequence she dances in front of backup dancers before flying up twenty feet in the air to grab the camera lens and stare into the audience.

That informs one of the major takeaways I got from this film. The power of gaze and the complex relationship its objects have to its subject. Marina repeatedly challenges the camera's focus on her even while she earns her title of "A Fantastic Woman." She is mesmerizing as she grieves for love she is repeatedly told wasn't real and that she isn't allowed to mourn. As the film depicts her increasing torment by the hateful members of Orlando's family -- especially in casual bigotry like we saw in Get Out that will hopefully make everyone who "means well" or "just wants to understand" educate themselves, but also in legitimate hate crime encounters -- she is given all she needs to wreak vengeance. She even sees visions of her dead lover, which is often all it takes for a mainstream movie hero to snap.

Not Marina. This movie, with its occasional daydreams and fantasies, is too grounded for that. It's subversive in its simplicity. A woman loses her lover and mourns him, learning who she is again in the face of death. That's it.

Then again, the film repeatedly accuses us of assuming we are entitled to her life. Of course, we do assume that. I'm thinking of a particular moment when Orlando's wretch of a son asks her if she's had surgery on her sexual organs. She responds with a simple "You don't ask that" and -- it's amazing -- the issue never comes up again. The film never tries to show her crotch in one of those Silence of the Lambs scenes of lurid fascination. At one point, near the end, we see her naked on her bed, looking at her crotch; the camera cuts to her perspective, and we see a mirror resting there. Instead of her genitals, we see her face staring back at us, as if to say, "What are you looking for?"

It's a dazzling assault on mainstream entitlement and ignorance.

IMDb: A Fantastic Woman

The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)

Score: 3.5 / 5

The newest (and, again, totally surprising) addition to the Cloverfield franchise is a radical game-changer, one that works in incredible ways but also doesn't in some. It's, fittingly, a paradox of a movie.

Think Alien (or, really, its updated version in Life) meets Solaris with a hint of Interstellar thrown in. In 2028, a team of international space scientists on a massive space station test a particle accelerator in the hopes of providing limitless energy for Earth. As we fully expect, something goes awry -- or, possibly, it worked a little too well -- and the beam creates a power surge. When all is seemingly restored, the team realizes that the Earth isn't outside their viewport anymore. Trying to curb the panic, the crew works to repair damages and scan the area for recognizable space. Strange things begin to happen (horrifying things, really) on board, mostly involving body horror, before the crew realize they've been --

Nope. I can't say anymore.

Does it sound like a standalone sci-fi thriller? It probably should. Apparently this film started as The God Particle and had nothing to do with an existing franchise. Once the movie changed hands though, a few additional scenes were added that connect this film to Cloverfield, and not just because the space station shares that name! A subplot involves a scientist's husband, still planetside, as the earth crumbles into chaos from the sudden appearance of monsters. The titular "Paradox", a conspiracy theory warning against testing the particle accelerator, articulates a fear that the experimental tool will open portals to other dimensions and create anomalies (such as the ones experienced on the station) that could threaten Earth. Apparently this is the origin story for the Cloverfield movies, even though it takes place in the future. Perhaps the time jump is another effect of the particle accelerator?

I really want to discuss finer points of this movie with you, but I'll try to leave it at that.

It's gotten some negative attention, and I'm really not sure why. It's not the sharpest script in the world and it's got some production flaws. But it's a really fun way to spend 100 minutes.

The film seems to be doing some great meta-things with the franchise, which I think deserves a lot of attention. This installment particularly flirts with a lot of genre boundaries, pushing its central character study of one scientist (played excellently by Gugu Mbatha-Raw). It's got a fabulous ensemble cast doing some solid work. It's got the science fiction experiment-gone-wrong stuff. It's got the ghostly presence of alien doubles and an imposter. It's got body horror and giant alien monsters. It's got trippy special effects and some chilly space thrills.

The movie -- and I can't believe I'm saying this -- works best because of all these disparate elements. Does it answer all the questions it raises? Hell no. But it doesn't have to. What the movie is doing is challenging our expectations of movies made for streaming, of sequels and franchise-building, and of this franchise in particular. This film is just short of being a thematic anthology in itself, and it simultaneously solidifies Cloverfield as being a sort of anthology series. We've had the found-footage flick, disaster movie, and post-apocalyptic thriller; now we get full-blown science fiction horror, surrealism and inter-dimension-ality, and the added bonus of chronology-bending.

This is one of the most surprising films in recent memory, not just because its existence and marketing was so unexpected, but because it's a total thrill ride that keeps turning dramatic corners. I never really knew what was going to happen next. And now I can't wait to see where the franchise goes.

IMDb: The Cloverfield Paradox

The Titan (2018)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Netflix's newest sci-fi thriller mashes together The Fly with something that might be Prometheus fanfiction. That is to say, while it's not terrible, it's a mess.

In a not-so-distant future, the overpopulated and war-torn Earth is looking to Titan, one of Saturn's moons, as a possible new home. Sam Worthington (is he playing a character, or just himself? I never really know) is recruited by Tom Wilkinson (forget the character names; they're unimportant) for an experimental training program that will prepare humans for the extreme conditions of the alien moon. The rigorous training and horrific experiments claim the lives of most of the team, and when Worthington is finally left standing as the sole success, he is no longer entirely human.

The Titan really wants to be profound, and I think that's what makes it fall flat. It centers on abstract ideas about human identity, evolution, and exploration. The heart of the story, it would seem, is not with the test subject himself but with his wife and son. The two watch, horrified, as their beloved man is injected and augmented with animal DNA and traits until he becomes a forced evolution of humanity. Homo titanien, he is labeled. What a crock. He looks like the bluish, scaly Engineer from the Alien franchise and can't communicate. He's a Frankenstein monster, but then the film lurches into a bizarre conspiracy mess about government agencies and money and other boring stuff that allows Wilkinson to be wicked. The film wants to be scientific but neglects to explore novel questions and possibilities: What would colonization actually look like? How would a single successful experiment become a legitimate wide-scale medical procedure, and who would undergo such a transformation?

Perhaps its primary problem is its budget. Shot in a gorgeous house that frankly steals the movie, it would seem the production only had funds for sets and salaries. Then again, the problems here are abundant. The special effects leave a lot to be desired, the script teeters violently between cerebral and campy, and half-baked ideas and sizable plot holes make navigating the movie at once treacherous and tedious. It doesn't help that Taylor Schilling is so desperately trying to make up for the lack of acting from her starring counterpart. Director Lennart Ruff doesn't know whose story he wants to tell or how to tell it. Its first two-thirds are a moody, broody character study with a lot of sci-fi freakshow buildup; its final stretch is body-horror-meets-romance with some gimmicky thriller elements, and none of it feels like it belongs to the same film.

I was left with a sometimes pretty, sometimes ugly movie with sometimes smart, sometimes silly ideas and a so-so attitude. If James Cameron or Ridley Scott or J.J. Abrams had been involved, I could imagine any of them attempting to rework it into an early prequel of some of their respective projects. That's why I think The Titan is fanfiction: It hadn't the budget nor the vision nor the copyright allowance to become greater than it is. That's not good for a movie about evolution.

Save your time for Annihilation. It's just better.

IMDb: The Titan

Beirut (2018)

Score: 4 / 5

Tony Gilroy's latest political thriller (if that's even the right genre label) centers on the cultural intersection of Beirut. The story starts in 1972, where the US diplomat Skiles (Jon Hamm) lives a liberal socialite life of wealth and influence. His foster son Karim, a Lebanese boy, becomes the target of an international intelligence effort to find his brother, a terrorist in the Munich Olympics massacre.

Ten years later, Skiles, now an alcoholic widower and corporate negotiator in America, is summoned to Beirut for a mysterious purpose, ostensibly to teach a seminar. Suspicious but compelled to go, he returns to the war-torn rubble of his former home. As he attempts to piece together his purpose there, he meets a strike team (including "the skirt" Rosamund Pike and a hairy, spectacled Dean Norris) who informs him that his former CIA friend was abducted and his kidnappers have requested Skiles to negotiate.

For someone -- like me -- who doesn't know the history of wars and politics and religious strife of the Middle East, Gilroy's screenplay leaves a little to be desired. Names and titles and dates and allegiances are tossed around with abandon and we're meant, I think, to follow it all. But the mazelike construction of the script, while fascinating, don't add as much tension to laypeople's experience viewing. On the other hand, director Brad Anderson does some fine work making the film still palatable and navigable; I was never totally lost in the drama.

Hamm is endlessly watchable as a leading man, sweating and drinking and brooding but always looking fabulous. He's a star who always keeps me guessing, and this is the first time I've seen him perform in a way that isn't all about him. He feeds from his fellow actors, and he listens to them in ways that could be taught in an acting masterclass. We can see his wheels turning, and it doesn't take long to see that his character is an exceptionally skilled negotiator. His double-speak and ballsy turns of phrases are almost as riveting as the earnest power behind his voice.

Besides Hamm, the film is a fairly run-of-the-mill procedural thriller with elements of espionage and war tossed in. While with a title like Beirut I might have wished for larger scale and a more fully-told story, something more like Munich. But Anderson is no Spielberg. What we get is something a little less polished and haunting than Detroit, a sort of microcosm of a larger world, a big story told in a surprisingly intimate way. Beirut is, ultimately, a dizzying moral compass in which no character is unblemished and cruelty and vice abound in the violence of our world. The final sequence of the film features flashes of news reports of what comes after the plot has ended, revealing that the film is more or less the quiet between storms: the civil war may have been bad, but horrors are still to come.

IMDb: Beirut

Isle of Dogs (2018)

Score: 2 / 5

Isle of Dogs is a perfect example of Anderson's artistry. The incredible design of the film and its stop-motion animation are more than enough to earn its praise. Abundant details keep everything magnificent on a big screen. The film isn't as colorful or vibrant as, for example, Moonrise Kingdom, but it's got some really arresting moments, especially the Western-meets-noir moments on Trash Island. It's got some slick, dry humor, too, which I was digging for the first half of the film, along with some incredible music. But style only works for me when it reinforces content.

The story is just weird. Thousands of dogs suffering dog flu and the prejudices of a dictatorial mayor are banished to a nearby landfill island. A lone boy, nephew to the despot -- destined for greatness by proximity to greatness, no doubt -- crashes his plane on Trash Island to find his own dog Spots. A group of alpha dogs (who are really anything but alpha in demeanor, as they gossip and bumble throughout the film) befriend him and help him search.

Unfortunately, Anderson keeps everything at a sort of ironic distance, valuing his own aesthetic over developing context or enhancing meaning in the story he's telling. That's not unlike his approach to every film under his name, but here I didn't see how it matched the story.

The film's logic is also woefully skewed. The dogs, though living in Japan, speak English and cannot understand the Japanese boy's speech, which becomes a point of sourly humorous absurdity. It seems that formal Japanese speeches must include a haiku poem, another point of absurdist humor that sat badly with me. And then there's the motif of a mushroom cloud (!) every time something explodes, something that felt severely shortsighted on Anderson's part. If Anderson wanted to pander to his American audience, presumably because we're so shallow we need to identify with the characters and can only do so when they speak English or are white, why set his movie in Japan?

A few more quick problems I noted. Most of the Japanese dialogue, rather than directly translated for the audience or even subtitled, is rendered though the medium of Frances McDormand's dialogue as a reporter. She translates (maybe) the essential bits of exposition. In a movie of male characters and male voice actors, it's not insignificant that there is one female dog (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) who is called a bitch at least once. Accurate? Sure. In poor taste? You betcha. The film also has an interesting anti-cat theme, one that I can sympathize with, that feels overt and more than a little sinister.

I was most disturbed, though, by the character of Tracy (voiced by Greta Gerwig, who really should have known better), an exchange student investigating the politics in Japan and the corruption of the mayor. Tracy is the White Savior, rousing the otherwise voiceless people of Japan and rallying them to confront the mayor. Her afro-style hair notwithstanding, when she finally leads a protest to interrupting the mayor's public address, she raises her fist in what looks suspiciously like a Black Power salute (never mind the lack of people of color in the ensemble film). Then, of course, there's the scene where she violently assaults the scientist Yoko Ono (voiced by Yoko Ono) to get her to stand up for herself and fight back against the mayor.

WHAT? Yeah. That happened.

I don't know, maybe I'm being too harsh. But I just didn't enjoy this movie, beautiful as it may be. Its problems are far more troubling than I expected; so much so, in fact, that I want to revisit his other movies and see if they're as disturbing. Humor doesn't have to come at the cost of racist or sexist jokes, and there's really no excuse for it these days. Especially not when your story sucks as it is.

IMDb: Isle of Dogs

Truth or Dare (2018)

Score: 1.5 / 5

When I heard that Jeff Wadlow was directing another horror movie, I was pumped. His Cry Wolf is one of my genre favorites, a subversive and meta flick that has fun playing with itself and its audience through a story that -- you guessed it -- involves a game. Naturally another film based on a game was going to be fabulous, right?

Then came the super spooky trailer, and I couldn't stop talking about it. The idea is that a group of friends gets lured into playing a game of Truth or Dare -- in an exotic location by a handsome stranger -- and things start getting weird. After they resume their lives back home, they realize that a supernatural force is haunting and hunting them through the game. Tell a lie and you die. Don't do the dare and you die. Refuse to play and you die. How bloody creepy is that? It's a meditation on the sadistic nature of peer pressure and games that transgress anxieties in social situations. If you can't dig that, you're wrong.

One problem. My advice: Keep watching the trailer and don't bother seeing the movie. It's like The Apparition or Ouija in that way. Whoever made the trailer is genius; whoever made the film is not.

It's not all bad, either. When you compare this to the endless new films in cinemas every week, it's a fun little flick. And as a genre lover, I'd rather watch this than some tepid romance about a girl who falls in love but can't go out into the sunlight. Truth or Dare has enough icky death scenes and tense narrative propulsion that I don't regret going to see it. And the story's concept is still writhing around in the back of my mind with pleasure.

I just can't help but wish it had been more satisfying. The primary problem is with its screenplay, which was apparently written by committee. It's flat and concerns flat characters who become little more than bodies to be disposed of. When it tries to go for depth -- when the characters learn the origin of the game and attempt to end it -- it quickly scales the ladder of absurdity. The mystery and suspense is cast aside in favor of rote plotting: The game has been haunted by a demon. It was summoned by a former nun in an old mission as an attempt to stop a lecherous priest from preying on children. To stop the demon and lift the curse, (SPOILER ALERT) the person who freed the demon must recite a Spanish prayer in the ancient mission, cut out their tongue, and seal it in a specific clay pot with wax.

Really?

I could go along with all that nonsense, maybe, if it was executed well. Unfortunately, the most compelling thing for me was watching the attractive-but-largely-talentless cast butcher themselves one by one. Nobody is likable, everyone does incredibly stupid things, and the screenplay doesn't account for plot hole after plot hole. Add to this the film's apparently desperate desire to remain squarely PG-13 when a hard R would have suited its material better. The camera looks away from the most exciting moments, the film edits out the shots we're desperate to see. Low budget moviemaking or no, there's really no excuse for pandering to a market. Not in a horror extravaganza.

And the final scene is so laughably silly that I probably would have walked out of the movie if it hadn't been the last scene.

Go see it, or don't. It's a silly, fun time. I'd recommend it for a lazy afternoon on a rainy day if you have nothing whatsoever to do, as long as you Redbox it and don't pay much.


IMDb: Truth or Dare

Ready Player One (2018)

Score: 3 / 5

In 2045, the world is apparently so wretched that people live for escapism. Columbus, Ohio, is such a highly populated and poorly regulated city that trash is piled almost as high as "the Stacks", a neighborhood of trailer homes on metal scaffolds that reach as high as skyscrapers. This is where Wade Watts lives (played by Tye Sheridan), a young orphan who obsessively lives in the OASIS, a virtual reality where pretty much everyone spends their time. Wade, however, is looking for the ultimate goal: the maker of the OASIS (a typically magnificent Mark Rylance) has included an Easter Egg; its finder will win control over the game.

Thus begins a science fiction adventure not unlike those that made Steven Spielberg famous. Wade gathers a group of oddball friends (including Olivia Cooke), pits himself against industry big-wig and power-mad poser Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), and leads a rebellion against big business seeking monopoly.

Ready Player One is in many ways a game within itself. It's so packed with movie, video game, and tv show references that I don't think there's a single person alive who knows them all. Apart from major set pieces and crucial plot points -- including King Kong and the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, Mechagodzilla and the Iron Giant, and a particularly fabulous scene inside The Shining -- almost every scene in the film includes figures such as Marvin the Martian and Freddy Krueger, who appear so quickly and so insignificantly that you could easily miss them. And that's assuming you even know all the references! I certainly didn't know half the things onscreen. At one point during the climax, a kid sitting behind me got excited because a squadron of Halo soldiers ran across the screen. I'm not even sure what Halo is.

These visuals present themselves in a mostly computer-generated world. It's awesome to behold, of course, much like things in The Hobbit or Avatar. Unlike those films, however, I found this movie to be particularly draining to view, because it moves so quickly and includes so much to watch for and pay attention to. There's only so much spectacle I can take before it all turns to mush in my brain, and with two hours and twenty minutes of running time, I was exhausted well before the halfway point.

Spielberg's gifts for amazing filmmaking aside, I did find myself disappointed with the story. It's really not a fresh tale, and it's not told in any original way. Visually, the movie rocks. Narratively, it falls flat, concerns flat characters, and can't outmaneuver sizable plot holes. Often I found myself wondering logistical things about the world of the film rather than giving myself over to the nostalgic pleasure; that detracts from what was obviously intended to be absorbing spectacle.

Then again, maybe that's just because I've never been a pop culture guru. I haven't read the book, but its author is credited as one of the screenwriters, so it's probably a close adaptation; I wonder if the novel suffers the same flaws in construction. But the movie surely speaks mostly to avid players of video games and creative fanatics who love to immerse themselves in fantasies of any media. And for that audience, its final message of taking a break and learning to engage with reality should be particularly poignant.

I don't know. I feel sort of "meh" about the whole thing. I could take it or leave it. It's diverting and fun (especially its soundtrack), but there's not much to chew on. Come for the spectacle, stay for Mark Rylance, and you'll walk out happy.

IMDb: Ready Player One

Chappaquiddick (2018)

Score: 2 / 5

It's a fascinating story, to be sure. Ted Kennedy, the last of the Kennedy sons, attends a party on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts, midsummer of 1969. While there, he drives his automobile off a small wooden bridge into standing water, wherein his lone passenger drowns. Though the true events of that night may never actually be known, the film maneuvers through differing testimonies and evidence in an engaging historical picture.

Unfortunately, despite some clearly researched writing and earnest acting, the film falls to its doom just like Kennedy's car. There's just nothing interesting about it. It's laid out like a crime procedural, but we don't even have the benefit of liking the characters. They're all rude and selfish and conniving, trying to save face and build campaign roots more often than being human beings. In this way, I wondered a few times if the film was simple propaganda, slinging mud at a beloved senator. Ultimately, I don't think that's the case, though it would have been more interesting of the film to reference Kennedy's lengthy and distinguished career, or even perhaps that his character matured and changed as a result of this tragedy. Something, at least, that didn't diminish the movie to the level of a one-note attack. (Well, I say "diminish", but really it's just not a great movie anyway. The editing is jarring when it's not boring and the screenplay is silly when it's not indigestible.)

Then again, I don't think the film is pandering to a conservative base, either. It's a damning portrayal of a man who -- whatever his intentions -- killed a woman that rings loudly in #MeToo America. The film is clearly made by a man, and the male gaze is palpable, especially in an unnecessary, icky sequence watching Kate Mara's character stuck in the car as it fills with water, gasping for air for far too long. But then, when she's discovered and pulled from her watery grave, she's raised up in Christ-like fashion. It's just a strange sequence. Whatever a film's subject's political alliance, it's important to recognize the importance of films that, whether truthful or not or to any degree, destabilize men in power and shed light on the ways in which law and politics can be so easily manipulated by money.

It's like watching an episode of House of Cards, except without the artistry. Director John Curran does his usual bland filmmaking, telling a story without much, if any, aesthetic inflection or inspiration. Actually, watching this film is more akin to watching a History Channel documentary/reenactment of the incident, it's so dramatically flat. Even Jason Clarke isn't particularly engaging as the man carrying the film, despite his fabulous talent, and Kate Mara, the only female role of any significance, of course dies less than a third of the way through the movie.

IMDb: Chappaquiddick

A Quiet Place (2018)

Score: 5 / 5

In a not-so-distant future (2019, to be less than exact), the world has been overrun by monsters. Their origin remains unknown, though they seem to be the alien version of a crab/spider hybrid, but it is common knowledge that they have extremely sensitive hearing. They hunt anything that makes much noise but are apparently blind. They move terrifyingly fast and tend to just smash anything that makes noise.

Enter the family of our story (do they even have names, apart from the credits?), played by real-life couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski. Their three children -- including Noah Jupe from Wonder and new Deaf actress Millicent Simmonds of Wonderstruck -- learn to live in silence, fearing for their lives. Living on a farm in isolated foothills, the family has fortified against attack by creating a soundproof basement, making paths of sand to soften footfalls, and stringing lights to indicate safety and danger (the use of red is a stroke of cinematic genius). They are incredibly prepared for everything and might be labeled a survivalist family, as the father has stockpiled all kinds of supplies and is aggressively researching both the monsters and his daughter's deafness, trying to find a connection between sound and survival.

Of course, the best-laid plans will go awry. It is a horror movie, after all. Apart from a few expository and scary scenes, especially an emotional opening on day 80-something of the apocalypse, most of the film takes place over the course of a single day and night when pretty much everything that could go wrong does go wrong. The family gets hopelessly split up, the mother goes into labor, the deaf daughter is out on her own, a bent nail causes pain (!), a monster comes lurking, and a series of disasters makes the entire second half of the film a nonstop climax. You can scarcely find time to breathe, which is good because breathing too loudly will attract the monsters.

A Quiet Place isn't necessarily the most innovative film you've ever seen, but it's close, and it's one of the best-executed genre films of the decade. Smart without being pretentious, the film moves along quickly and carries you each step of the way. You're never lost or confused; every moment is important to our experience as viewers. The movie makes you care instantly about everyone, ratcheting up our dread about their fates, and earning your tears at the end. Fret not! While grief and death inevitably stake their claim, the final five minutes of the film will make you want to stand and cheer, as at least three people did in the viewing I saw last night.

What else can we say? It's impeccably detailed, bone-chilling and endlessly terrifying, heartfelt and sweet, and ultimately rousing. The sound mixing and editing is really amazing, and it boasts a gorgeous musical score. And, really, you just can't get much better than Emily Blunt being badass.

IMDb: A Quiet Place

Acrimony (2018)

Score: 2 / 5

It's pretty much what you expect. A reasonably trashy romantic thriller in which the characters do terrible things to each other but look gorgeous anyway.

Melinda Gayle (Taraji P Henson) is having a restraining order placed upon her. As she is forced to speak with a therapist, she tells her story of love and loss in voiceover through the remainder of the film. That is, the whole film, since this was the first scene.

It's actually not even a great story. She fell in love with a hot young man whose dreams of success become manifest in a self-sustaining battery he hopes to sell. She supports him financially, emotionally, sexually, and every other -ly for most of their lives and most of the movie, even though he is caught time and again in lying and cheating and all but stealing her inheritance, her earnings, her sanity. The story is infuriating, and you just get tired of people being stupid and ugly to each other.

At least, that's how we're meant to take it. About 2/3 of the way through, though, I began to have my doubts, and this is where the film gets really weird. Her ex-husband now, Robert (Lyriq Bent) finds success after meeting up with an old flame, Diana (Crystle Stewart), and selling his fancy battery. He magnanimously gives Melinda flowers and her old house and a check for $10 million. And it's at this point that she snaps and goes full Fatal Attraction on his ass. The last, I don't know, 20 minutes or less of the film consist of her sneaking about Robert's pearly-white yacht and attempting to butcher him and Diana.

But these final moments of full-blown crazy aren't enough to steal the film. Henson is in only half the movie, and while she acts the pants off everyone else, she can't quite overcome the deeply problematic script. Problematic, I should say, because whether this is Fatal Attraction 2.0 or not, the treatment of this woman is downright cruel, if she is indeed suffering from mental illness, as multiple characters in the film suggest. Similarly, director Tyler Perry, though allowing for some emotional intelligence in storytelling and some fine damn cinematography, cannot make the film rise above the mess of other -- better -- films in its genre. I love me some Taraji P, but for now, I'll stick with her on Empire and wait for a better script and director to revive the psycho-ex-lover thriller.

IMDb: Acrimony