If the suspense is killing you, you're probably on your way to the theater right now, and you can't be stopped. The movie marks Perry's second outing as a film director. The mostly watchable "Madea's Family Reunion," from last year, was his first.
Here Perry shelves his crowd-pleasing Madea character and aspires for the impossible mix of 1950s social melodrama, gospel-inflected public service announcement, soap opera, R&B video, girl-centric sitcom on the CW, and any episode of "Good Times," featuring Janet Jackson's oft-affronted Penny. Were Perry a visual director or a logical, patient screenwriter, that hybrid would count as a feat of singular ambition. Instead, it seems like the product of an abbreviated attention span.
Once in a while, Perry's shot-making goes for broke and breaks down. In an early scene, we discover that Monty's girls have been staying with his ex's mama. She's got a nasty cough. And after she tells Monty that he must come to family court to take custody of his girls and he demurs (too much work at the garage), she tells him what's really going on. "I have lung cancer, Monty. I been hangin' on for the girls as long as I could, but I'm dyin.' I'm dyin'!" He tells her things will be all right, and she says they won't. As she does, the camera pans down for a solemn shot of the prescription pills and the ashtray full of cigarette butts on her kitchen table. There's a fade out, then a pan up for a glimpse of her casket.
Perry carves up the rest of the running time to give us horror scenes of the girls with their mother and scenes of Julia going on some embarrassing blind dates and of her mixed up in one testy disagreement after the next, either with Monty or her girlfriends, who are played by Tracee Ellis Ross and Terri J. Vaughn, both of whom are underused.
All the conflicts in this movie spring from snap judgments, and no one seems to want to listen or communicate when it counts. That seems especially improbable since Union and Elba (the English actor who played the suave kingpin Stringer Bell on "The Wire"), are such expressive, extremely thoughtful performers. They have chemistry and they have class. What they don't have is a filmmaker who knows yet how to use either to make real movie magic.
I'm rooting for him to figure it out.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movie s , go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
