2018's Acrimony Is Another Tyler Perry Stinker About the Evil of Womenfolk and the Saintliness of Men
Taraji P. Henson IS the Sad Lady in Acrimony!
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For a man who has become a literal billionaire wearing a dress and pretending to be a broad caricature of Southern female African-American sassiness Tyler Perry does not seem to have an overly positive view of women.
The 2018 thriller Acrimony might as well be titled Tyler Perry Hates Women but that wouldn’t exactly narrow it down, as that is the theme of many of Perry’s movies. They are chockablock with impossibly handsome, kind-hearted men and evil women full of hatred and rage.
Men are angels. Women are demons. They aren’t a gender; they are an affliction.
In 2018 Taraji P. Henson, who had worked with Tyler Perry twice before (2008’s The Family That Preys and 2009’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself) was unfortunate enough to play an unusually pure manifestation of Perry’s seething misogyny in Acrimony.
Henson plays protagonist Melinda Moore Gayle as pure evil, a figure of downright Satanic darkness who will stop at nothing to destroy the saintly, selfless dreamer genius who had the audacity to move on just because she divorced him.
The last movie I saw Henson in was Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie where she played a mad scientist who wants to use magnets to acquire super-powers. Her voice performance as the puppy-hating big boss is a marvel of understatement and nuance compared to her performance here.
Heck, Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger are the very image of restraint compared to Henson’s portrayal of the worst person in the history of the universe.
Acrimony’s framing device finds Mad Melinda serving as the most unreliable of unreliable narrators as she talks to a court-appointed psychologist about her relationship with ex-husband Robert Gayle (Lyric Bent).
The two meet crazy when Robert, who is played as a young man by Antonio Madison, accidentally bumps into Melinda, who is played by Ajiona Alexus, and she flies into a violent rage and begins pummeling him with her fists.
Robert is the kind of guy who can appreciate a gal who violently assaults people for no reason. So he pursues the driven young psychopath and eventually works up the nerve to propose to her.
From the start there is a disconnect in what Melinda is saying happened and what we can see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. In a voice positively vibrating with evil angry female rage Melinda describes Robert as a fiend deserving of the most fiendish, elaborate and unimaginable torments of hell when he actually seems like a pretty good guy.
He seems like more than just a pretty good guy: he seems like a great guy: handsome, loving, brilliant, persistent and willing to work with his hands and get sweaty, always a positive in Perry’s book.
Yet Melinda resents and distrusts her too good to be true hubby because he once cheated on her with Diana Wells (who is played by Shavon Kirksky as a young woman and Crystle Stewart as an adult).
This enraged Melinda to the point that she drove her car into Robert’s RV, nearly killing them and herself in the process. The Christ-like Robert is somehow able to forgive Melinda’s psychotic, homicidal outbursts because she support him financially while he pursues his dreams of becoming a revolutionary inventor.
Perry is a billionaire yet his portrayal of the world of business is as cartoonish and childlike as that of The Jetsons. Robert’s brilliant strategy is to send videos of himself with a battery MacGuffin he invented to a venture capitalist he wants to impress over a period of years, even decades, in hope of someday securing a meeting with him so that he can pitch his wares.
Melinda thinks that Robert is a big dummy whose battery will never work so he gets blue collar work with her family business, with the suspiciously melodramatic caveat that if the business screws up even a single delivery they lose everything.
Then, in what could literally be deemed an unbelievable turn of events Robert gets the big call that the rich white dude he’s been inundating with videotaped spiels for ages finally wants to meet with him that day.
Unfortunately this opportunity happens while Robert is in the middle of a delivery, meaning that he has to choose between pursuing his lifelong dream or keeping Melinda’s family’s business from going under.
The venture capitalist is VERY impressed by Robert so he offers him 800,000 dollars for his miracle battery but he turns it down because he knows that it’s worth more, and that he is worth more.
Melinda does not feel the same way. She is of the mindset that he isn’t shit, and his battery isn’t shit, and that he can ahead with his broke, deluded ass.
No one is as blessed as a handsome man with a totally ripped body in a Tyler Perry movie so his dreams are realized when he goes into business with the venture capitalist and is finally able to do with his new/old love Diana Wells (who conveniently happens to work for the venture capitalist) what he never could with Melinda.
Melinda is very angry. Then again Melinda is alway very angry. That’s what makes her so evil. Well, that and being a woman.
She is apoplectic that Robert has the audacity to move on from their awful marriage just because she verbally and physically abused him and then filed for divorce. Her toxic bond with her now happy and successful ex-husband becomes a Fatal Attraction.
The scenery devouring, wildly over the top Henson goes full Psycho as she sets out to ruin her husband’s charmed new life by pouring acid on Diana’s wedding dress and cosplaying as Robert De Niro in Cape Fear aboard the boat that Robert bought with his new millions.
Being the greatest guy in the world Robert even cuts his psychotic, homicidal ex-wife a check for ten million dollars in recognition of her supporting him and his dream for all those years but that doesn’t impress her much. She wants Diana’s life and isn’t above committing murder to get back what she happily gave away.
Henson is a great actress but her performance here is an embarrassment. She’s never anything other than a hateful caricature of unhinged female rage directed less at the man who ostensibly did her wrong than the woman she holds responsible for all of her troubles.
For reasons of pointless pretension, the film is separated into categories based on the emotional spectrum that Melinda experiences: Acrimony, Sunder, Bewail, Deranged and Inexorable.
Why? I have no idea. It certainly doesn’t add anything to what would be an utterly worthless experience if not for the wall to wall soundtrack of Nina Simone songs. That’s all Acrimony has going for it but it helps make this melodramatic two hour slog endurable if not remotely pleasurable.
Would the other choice, Boo! A Madea Halloween 2 been any better? I’d like to think that it couldn’t get any worse but having seen my share of Tyler Perry movies I know that’s probably not true. With that guy it can always get worse yet that hasn’t kept the man from becoming a world famous billionaire.
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