Summary
Tyler Perry’s Duplicity is, predictably, bad, but not in a fun way like usual. It’s a political movie that wants to raise points without bothering to examine them.
The most charitable thing I’m willing to say about Tyler Perry’s Duplicity is that it probably won’t end up being the worst movie of the year. This is high praise for the man behind such execrable dross as Beauty in Black, Divorce in the Black, and Mea Culpa, but I’ll concede it’s a backhanded compliment. This is still, at its most fundamental level, nonsense, but it at least pretends it wants to be a real movie until what is by all accounts one of the most ridiculous and unintentionally hysterical denouements I’ve seen in recent times.
Streaming on Prime Video, Duplicity wants to be a political movie. The plot hinges on an unarmed Black man being shot by a white cop and the victim’s hotshot lawyer sister and TV anchor widow taking the state to task for racist negligence. But it’s also a Tyler Perry movie, so this is only the setup for an increasingly absurd story about how reflexively running with political narratives without properly interrogating a situation objectively leads only to ruin. Or something, anyway.
You can tell something’s amiss right from the start, and it only becomes more obvious as things go. The circumstances around the shooting are weird. Rookie cop Caleb (Jimmi Stanton) and his supervising officer Kevin (RonReaco Lee, Coffee & Kareem) happen to come across Rodney Blackburn (Joshua Adeyeye) jogging through an affluent neighborhood, and Caleb ends up gunning him down when he pulls what looks like a gun but turns out to be his phone.
Despite some odd details and the fact that the bodycam footage reveals the shooting to be pretty justified, Rodney’s sister Marley Wells (Kat Graham, as seen in How It Ends, The Holiday Calendar, and Love in the Villa) nonetheless launches into a very public attack on the state, implying that Caleb was an incompetent racist and another Black man has senselessly lost his life at the hands of those whose job is to serve and protect. She’s so sure that she’s right that we know immediately she’s wrong, but it takes the entire movie to figure out in what precise way.
This is a lot of the problem with Duplicity. The setup is so flagrantly suspicious that it’s weird nobody bothers investigating it properly, and Marley is so sure in her convictions that the audience is just waiting for twists that are saved until the very end. In the meantime, there’s nothing but contrived amateur sleuthing, with Marley and her comically handsome ex-cop-turned-P.I. boyfriend Tony (Tyler Lepley, as seen in Harlem) both investigating the killing and circuitous conversations about its political implications.
Kat Graham in Tyler Perry’s Duplicity | Image via Prime Video
You can tell Tyler Perry wants to use Duplicity to make a cogent political point, but he doesn’t seem to have any idea what that point might be. There’s tons of really on-the-nose messaging that would ring true if it wasn’t so obvious that the plot was ultimately going somewhere else, but the twists and turns render it toothless at best and meaningless at worst. The underlying point might be – and probably is – that our political allegiances and cultural biases often blind us to the truth of a situation, and the assumptions we make are often dangerous. But it’s so shoddily argued that I can’t even say with any real confidence that this was the ultimate intention.
As ever, Perry seems to have chosen his cast based on how attractive they are rather than their ability to convincingly embody characters who are supposed to be in the throes of grief, but the script doesn’t exactly help them either, because nobody behaves like a real human being might. Nobody stops to consider an alternate point of view or pays attention to the deeply suspicious stuff happening right in front of their nose or asks the most obvious questions in any given scenario. It makes the whole thing frustrating to watch, and the fact it’s of slightly higher quality than Perry’s usual dreck means it lacks that so-bad-it’s-good vibe that often characterizes his work. It’s mostly just boring.
Until the ending. Oh, the ending. Only rarely have I seen a climax as unintentionally farcical as the one in Duplicity, where characters awkwardly explain their schemes and motivations out loud for no reason at all, and each subsequent reveal – moments after the last – layers new nonsense on top. It’s impressively bad filmmaking, like nobody involved had any idea how to bring the movie to a sensible close and simply decided to bring it to the most ridiculous one possible instead.
In any movie, this would be a shame but in one that wants to be about vital racial and political issues, it’s particularly egregious. Duplicity presents those issues and does nothing with them; doesn’t think about or examine them, and doesn’t challenge the audience to do the same. It instead makes it really clear that something is amiss, spends two hours explaining how, and then says, simply, “Turns out this wasn’t all that clear cut guys.” We knew that from the start!
I don’t want to break it to Tyler Perry but pointing out that emotional reactions and preconceived prejudices often lead to incorrect and harmful conclusions isn’t the kind of revelatory statement he seems to think it is. That’s the most fundamental, surface-level starting point when it comes to approaching a complex issue, but Duplicity never moves beyond this, offering no nuance in its plot, characters, or even aesthetics. It’s bad, as all Perry’s movies tend to be, but it’s not even enjoyably bad like usual.
