A Fall from Grace (A Tyler Perry's movie)

Crystal Fox stars as Grace. She's the one who's accused of murder, and she's wonderful in this. I enjoyed her performance, and she is convincing both in her happiness and her anguish.

Sure, her lines aren't the best, and I blame that on the writing, but at least she gives a good performance. Phylicia Rashad is in this also, and she does fairly well, but at times she just feels very stiff. Like, she's just stifled, and I don't know why she would be stifled.

I don't know if it's the dialogue or the direction or what it is, but she doesn't feel natural. She doesn't feel totally alive. Maquod Brooks is the suave man who romances Grace, and sometimes he's really good, and other times he's very overdramatic.

I wanted to like Brescia Webb. She's kind of the star in this next to Crystal Fox, but I just couldn't too often. Sometimes her line delivery was just really bad.

Sometimes her acting was very stiff, and she looks like a likable character, and I wanted to root for her, and maybe it was just the writing, but some of her acting, too, just wasn't drawing me in, which is a bummer because, again, she's one of the protagonists in this. A surprise of somebody who's in this is Cicely Tyson. I didn't know she was going to be, and she has such a minor role.

It's almost like they put her in for name recognition because she is a spectacular actress, but she was just wasted in this. She barely gets any time. She is good for what she does, but, again, she's just barely there.

I wanted to see more of her. The pace is really slow in this, and it's drawn out, and that ends up hampering the drama, the tension, the suspense that the movie is trying to build. By the third act, it just gets ridiculous.

It's a court scene that just gets more and more bad. It goes downhill and can't stop itself. It's like it's tripping over its feet and just goes into a roll. The dialogue gets bad. It's cringeworthy. I felt bad for the actors.

I felt embarrassed for them because I was like, "Oh, my gosh, please, why are you still doing this?" This is terrible. It's so far out of real life, and it was depressing to watch in this last act. Overall, the show is uneven.

The delivery isn't consistent. The drama and the melodrama, they ebb and flow and just make it weird and break any type of just story development that they're trying to do. It draws you out of it.

And then there's the end, the climax. It comes right near the end of the film, and that's not really the problem. It's just that it is so rushed at that point where they're just like, "Oh, well, here's the entire point that we were trying to do, and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Done. End of movie. Really?

And the other bad part about that is as we're leading to this climax, the clues are so obvious that it's painful. They're spelled out, laid out, but then it takes minutes and minutes and minutes to get there, and you're like, "Oh, gosh, come on." You've already shown us what it was going to be. We know what's going to happen. Just get us there already, but no, it's not going to.

There are some laughable moments in this as well. Thankfully, not a lot, but they're not intentional. There's one point where somebody pulls up and they're following the camera car, and they need to pull off again. Somebody gets out of the car, they continue on their way, but the camera car is too close to the car with the actors in there. So the actor literally backs up the car, turns the wheel, and goes. It was the most ridiculous thing.

I wanted this to be better, and it really could have been better. I give it 4/10 rating. There is a lot of talent on the screen, and they're just not given the right story or script or even maybe direction to do what they needed to with this.

Images source: IMDB