I will admit to being a fan of Tyler Perry’s work, with the best for me being Diary of a Mad Black Woman and For Colored Girls. Taraji P. Henson has done numerous films with Perry already, but clearly they like working together because she is back with his latest Acrimony co-starring Lyriq Bent. Could Perry’s second R rated feature offer up something that stands out like his past work or will it just drive the viewer crazy?

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Acrimony follows Melinda Gayle, a faithful wife tired of standing by her devious husband and becomes enraged when it becomes clear she has been betrayed. Melinda finds out that her husband gets engaged to another woman, and loses control and all hell breaks loose. The trailers for this movie never did all that much for me, but I went in with an open mind and as a fan of both Perry and Henson. I was happy that the story that the trailer seems to be selling is actually different in the film itself. This didn’t make the film all that much better, but it at least gave me something to be happy about because the film is a struggle to get through.

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One of the worse things that can happy with any feature is for it to feel long and this film felt way longer than its two hour run time. There is a lot of trimming that could have been done to help this, but that still wouldn’t have likely helped the overall film. There are so many things that just don’t work that the film struggled from the very beginning. For the first half of the film it focuses on younger versions of the leads played by Antonio Madison and Ajiona Alexus who also plays the young Cookie Lyon on the hit series Empire. Sadly this entire aspect of the film is just bad. The performances are hit and miss with it missing more than anything and the leads have no chemistry at all for you to buy into their relationship and her ongoing willingness to forgive him.

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Once it shifts to the adult versions it doesn’t get all that much better. Henson is fine in the role, but is really just playing another version of Cookie. Sure she is given the chance to go a bit nutty at times, but its not anything new and is slapped right in the middle of a silly story filled with frustration and annoyingness. The amount of time that we have to watch her deal with nonsense makes you quickly lose any sympathy for her no matter how she is treated. The finale was predictable and went in a silly by the numbers crazed direction that could have offered up something at least nostalgic of the films like in the 90s, but instead just falls flat.