I thought I was going to rate this Tyler Perry flick pretty well in its first half hour. It sets up interesting characters and scenario where someone is murdered. I saw the murder mystery / conspiracy structure setup and I was thinking “Hey, yeah, a solid Tyler Perry one-of-these”… but it fell apart as it lurched its way to a predictable end.

The film is about two happy women, both with a man. One is a newscaster and the other a lawyer. The newscaster’s boyfriend goes out for a jog and winds up shot by the police. Now the lawyer is pissed and looking to get her friend some restitution. Meanwhile, the city is dealing with another young black man shot. But something else might be going on. Who made that phone call before the shooting?

This was an intriguing setup and I was all set to put on my deerstalker and pipe to figure it out. But the movie insists upon being almost two hours long and the investigation gets kludged down with some unnecessary scenes, preachiness, and other problems. And once it gets to its big eye-rolling reveals, you’ve already figured it out in advance and have to go through the motions of another Tyler Perry potboiler final act. He’s just not good at these extended storylines and mustache-twirling finales.

The flick tries to take on police violence and… well… kind of cocks it up by mixing up its messages. But that’s ok, because Perry is going to spell it out for you at the end… and suggest taking advantage of young black men getting shot is not cool. Says the guy who made a movie about a young black man getting shot for Prime Video. Hmph.

So, yeah, the whole thing falls apart and gets tedious and monotonous. I wanted to like it but just couldn’t deal with the length and tired filmmaking. It is, at least, one of his better bad films… at least during the first act.

Score: 64