Rated PG-13 for the most family friendly cursing and family family crude references you can make while still appearing to be edgy. The bigger red flag is the racism experienced throughout, coupled with the fact that this is a war film, so there's going to be death. The Six Triple Eight might be the most smoothed out, palatable version of a heavy event imaginable because it's meant to appeal to Hallmark channel audiences while still carrying a message.
DIRECTOR: Tyler Perry It's D.E.A.R. Day (Drop Everything and Read Day) at work today because it's Catholic Schools' Week. I'm making the most out of that and trying to knock out a lot of a novel today. But I also need to squeeze this guy in so I don't fall behind on the ol' Oscar nominations list. And I have to be honest with you. The "Best Original Song" category is starting to kill me a bit. There are exceptions, like Flamin' Hot, which is a movie that only my wife and I enjoyed. Do you understand how disappointing of an experience The Six Triple Eight was? For years, YEARS!, I've wanted to get into Tyler Perry movies. I mean, there was nothing stopping me. These movies were easily accessible to me. I watch enough movies that not one would bat an eye that I picked up a new subproject in watching Tyler Perry movies. But the trailers looked so bad. There was actually this weird line where I knew that I might hate watch them and I didn't want to do that. Hate watching something is the worst. People should try new things, but want to like them. At one point --and this is a bit too real --I thought I might be trying to show off how antiracist I was by proclaiming that I watched Tyler Perry movies. That's not a good look. We should all be antiracists. I don't know if proclaiming "I watch Tyler Perry movies" is the answer to society's call. I'm starting a list of directors that I like as people, but I don't necessarily like as directors. Tyler Perry might now be on that list. I've listened to Tyler Perry talk about lots of subjects and I find him fascinating. He's great when he appears in other people's works. But an actual Tyler Perry movie, based on The Six Triple Eight is a bad time. And I totally understand why. Let's talk about content first because this is the least of the problem with this movie. Does the story of the real 6888 need to be told? Oh my goodness, yes. It is a fascinating part of history and, in this era of whitewashing history to exclude Black contributions to the great moments in textbooks, the 6888 story needed to be told. But the issue with this (and this is --again --not the root problem) is that it is a difficult story to tell. These are the Black women who risked their lives to deliver mail when no one else could do it. Very cool. That story, unfortunately, does not lend itself to a visual medium. It's hard to visually show how difficult it is to sort mail and risk life and limb to get those letters out there. So there's a lot of talking. There's a lot of shots of piles of mail. That, in terms of making an engaging war movie, isn't very impressive. There's a lot of speech making and marching. That's good set dressing. That is not a film. The bigger problem (and I am taking a huge swing here!) is Tyler Perry himself. I've heard the criticisms of Tyler Perry and now that I've seen what one of his movies looks like, I get it. Tyler Perry --while he's an artist, which is a concept that I refuse to ignore --is a financial guy first and an artist second. There's a reason for this. He's a guy who knows that Black art tends to get relegated to a lower tier of studio involvement. In a similar way that kids' movies tend to have one film at the theater at a time, movies starring people of color seems to go to the theater to almost meet a quota. Perry makes movies to get Black voices out there in greater numbers. But as such, he runs his studio like a business. As a business, there are so many choices that he makes that absolutely ruin a movie. If I'm using The Six Triple Eight as my only example, the movie suffers from budget and tonal issues. If Perry is a businessman first, making things out of Tyler Perry Studios, he knows that he has to squeeze as much movie out of so few dollars and that's going to hurt his final product. Okay. That's the easy read. The movie just looks cheap. Digital fire. Crappy logos and fonts. It looks like it was made in iMovie at times. Just a whole bunch of cost cutting methods, especially for a movie that is meant to look epic scale, hurts the product overall. But the bigger issue is that Perry wants as many eyes on this movie as possible. One of the things we have to understand that for every Deadpool and Wolverine, that gets all the money, there are a million other great R-rated movies that don't get a ton of cash to them. The R-rating tends to hurt movies way more often than it helps them. By that logic and the data, the more family friendly a movie is, the more money it will make. Tyler Perry is no dummy. He knows that he has a movie to make that has an important message in an era where people are skittish to admit that they're progressive. If anything, they want to go back to an era where they think that they're not racist and the message isn't condemning. To get that movie seen by as many people as possible, you have to make the racists comically racist. You have to make people of color fun and unproblematic. It all feels unreal. Like, the movie isn't good. I will admit that the quality of the latter half of the film is better than the first half. The movie starts off with this sequence that shows that it is wartime. There's a downed plane that's on fire and the planed hasn't been downed nor is it on fire. It just looks like a set piece with digital fire around it. And the entire first half of the movie has this weird, Pleasantville-y vibe to the whole thing. Do you know what it really comes across as? This movie feels wildly under researched. It is more about striking the World War II tone without any of the reality of World War II. The research that went into this movie didn't come from historical documents. They came from other inspirational World War II movies. As such, it feels like a photocopy of a photocopy. Let's use a functional inspirational World War II movie. While I don't love Unbroken as a movie, I do acknowledge that, as a film, it mostly is serviceable. I think the book is far more interesting than the movie is, but that's a different blog that I would rather not write. This seems like someone was just copying the aesthetic of that movie without justifying any of it. It also hurts that none of the dialogue feels real, nor do the relationships. When there isn't a budget to show the horrors of war, a lot of the weight is put on character dynamics. The pivotal relationship in the movie is between Lena and Abram. Just to catch you up, Lena, a Black woman, is in love with Abram, a Jewish boy who dies at war. Of course, during this time, few people support such a relationship. But Abram dies in the first few minutes of the movie. As a device to show how Lena struggles, she often "sees" Abram in stressful situations, causing her to collapse. It's that weird fine line between "Is she literally seeing a ghost?" or is she just reminded of Abram. It's done poorly and I was trying to figure out why. The real reason is that there is no chemistry at all between these two people. I'm so sorry to Gregg Sulkin, who I enjoyed quite a bit on Runaways, but a lot of that comes from your performance. I honestly don't believe it's your fault. Most of Lena and Abram's relationship is done in shorthand. They have these over the top moments that almost point to "Look, we're in love" without ever really being in love. If anything, Abrams comes across as not a person but a fountain of grand gestures. There's nothing there. Similarly, the conflict between Lena and Major Adams doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I get the idea of the Major being hard on Lena for being a weak recruit, but this divide between the two characters feels largely manufactured without anything to justify it. It comes across as Major Adams picking on Lena because she's bored, not because she is pushing her because she's capable. This is Lena's story. While the overall takeaway is that the 6888th Battalion would be the soldiers who got the mail working during World War II, the protagonist is Lena. We have to look at the story from Lena's perspective. Her major external conflict is to get Major Adams off her back while her internal conflict is to find a way to cope with the death of her love (who, again, has no chemistry with her). But there is no gauntlet that the two go from. You have these two polarized character who have to somehow break before the conflict resolves. Instead, we don't really have this. They just have a chat and the two become best friends. That's not midway through the movie. That's the climax. No stress. Just mutual admiration that is borderline a misunderstanding of intention. I don't care for that. There are too many good actors in this movie for it to be the way it is. Golly, I feel for Dean Norris. I can just imagine that Tyler Perry kept saying, "Go bigger." "Give me more." It's really rough. Like, the character's level of bigotry is so hilarious that even the most racist jerk would be like, "I'm not racist because I'm not that guy." It's such an archetype. Listen, call out racism. Absolutely. But make it so we get an image of what racism reads like. It feels like a cartoon in this movie and that's probably not helping anyone. This movie is catnip for old ladies. It was tough getting through. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
February 2025
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