2.7 Stars

Written and Directed
by Tyler Perry

Tyler Perry is one of those successful auteurs who doesn't exactly knows what he's doing, but does is well anyway. This time he's doing another expansion of one of his plays, a thing about a bunch of rich people going to a weekend retreat in Colorado and getting everything out in the open. Just the thing to make a critic swoon, right?, but as a Black man, he's not supposed to do something that sophisticated, especially since the guy is famous for his neo-minstralcy.

So Perry is trying to break out into something greater, but can't quite do it. The title is a book written by a famous psychologist named Patricia (Janet Jackson), who's husband Gavin (Malik Yoba) is an architect, and the two host the abovementioned retreat for their old buddies, who are mostly frustrated men and stereotypical female caricatures which could be considered racist had not the writer/director been Black.

Terry (Tyler Perry) is a saintly pediatrician married to a workaholic litigator named Dianne (Sharon Leal). She's so busy that they haven't had sex in months. Sheila (Jill Scott) is so fat that she's thrown off a plane, and is, in fact the only sympathetic woman in the whole bunch. Her husband Mike (Richard T. Jones) is truly evil, belittling her at every opportunity, and going so low as to invite his MISTRESS (Denise Boutte) to the retreat in order to humiliate poor Shelia even more; Angela (Tasha Smith) is sassy to the extreme. She and her husband Marcus (Michael Jai White), a former pro football player who works for her, are having problems with his ex and the fact that she's a drunken bitch, and almost as dislikeable as Mike.

So once they get up there, the talkfest begins. Perry's writing is intelligent, but he really doesn't have fully three-dimensional characters, more likely two and a half. But is really strange to be rooting for all the marriages depicted to break up, only the one that's the most dysfunctional actually does, but the characters are so annoying that one wants to slap some of them upside the head

The acting, except for Janet Jackson, who's as bland as melba toast, is really good, and it would be interesting to have focused on Mike's mistress a bit more, and the character of Troy (Lamman Rucker), who owns the place they're at, is a little to bland for his own good as well.

It's good, but not great, and is worth a place in the NetFlix queue.

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