Meagan Good

  • Death Saved My Life (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) I often joke that one of the reasons why Lifetime/Hallmark/BET movies are so popular with their intended audiences is that they keep recycling the same plot for added comfort even in delivering “thrills.”  But I didn’t expect the Lifetime original movie Death Saved My Life to track so closely another film. Let’s see—woman realizing that she’s in an abusive relationship gets out of it by faking her death, but is later found out by the abuser, leading to a final violent confrontation. So far so good? Well, that also happens to be the plot summary of 2017’s BET original movie Til Death Do Us Part, and it’s not even race-flipped for plausible deniability. Alas, it also manages to be worse and even more morally conflicted. Til Death Do Us Part, for all of its blunt caricature of an abusive marriage and cliché plotting, was at least clear on the moral righteousness of its protagonist: she was an angelic victim, and the husband (after a perfect honeymoon period) was a cartoonishly evil person. Our protagonist was also relatively clever in the confines of the genre, having a near-perfect plan unravelled by an innocent dangling thread. When the film moved on to the final confrontation, there wasn’t much ambiguity: she was good, he was bad, he wanted to kill her, so she defended herself. Not great art, but at least we knew where we stood. Death Saved My Life can’t even manage that. Our heroine is not only dumb as dirt, but her post-disappearance plan becomes an implausibly elaborate campaign of psychological torture, even endangering innocents in targeting her no-good surgeon husband. In going too far in revenge, Death Saved My Life becomes a confused piece of work, with the tormented becoming such a tormenter than the entire thing becomes far less enjoyable. It also feeds into a vexing finale that has the merit of not reaching for pure violence, but still leaves unsatisfied. It would have been a fascinating reversal of expectations in a more sober-minded drama examining the consequences of righteous revenge, but let’s face it: Death Saved My Life is utterly uninterested in nuance—good woman beats bad man is about as sophisticated as it wants to be. As much as it pains me to do so, I’m going to recommend watching a low-budget BET original instead: At least Til Death Do Us Part has the advantage of knowing exactly what it’s doing. Too bad for Meagan Good—she (alongside her real-life sister playing he fictional sister) deserved better than this.

  • Think like a Man (2012)

    Think like a Man (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) As an ensemble romantic comedy, there isn’t much in Think Like a Man that hasn’t been done countless times. But knowing what happens next is part of the charm, and charm is what this film has in abundance. Part of it is akin to hanging out with friends and checking out the good-looking members of the opposite sex. We get to spend some time with characters incarnated by Michael Ealy, Jerry Ferrara, Romany Malco, Terrence J and an appropriately limited dose of Kevin Hart (far better used in supporting rather than leading roles), as well as get a good long look at no less than Meagan Good, Regina Hall, Taraji P. Henson and Gabrielle Union. It’s a wonder it took me seven years to watch the film—I should have known better. Set in Los Angeles, it’s a breezy, highly enjoyable romantic comedy, somewhat reminiscent of the 2014 version of About Last Night (with which it shares three lead actors and a setting) albeit more comic and less romantic. Given that it’s a two-hour movie with four main couples and an ensemble cast, nearly everything follows strict genre conventions, through the inevitable ups and down and semi-synchronized victories. The main problem with the film comes from its premise, not only adapting the content of comedy/relationship book by Steve Harvey [“Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.”] but also placing the book itself in the middle of the plot as a how-to guide that leads the characters in their action. Truth be told, the “wisdom” of the book is either basic or reflective of fairly set ideas about relationships: you’d think that the supposedly smart characters would know how to treat everything in moderation. But that’s the way the movie goes, so it’s not particularly useful to rebel against the premise. Thanks to some unobtrusive direction from Tim Story, Think Like a Man moves quickly and efficiently through the bits and pieces of its plot, with some well-integrated music tying it all together. Michael Ealy is a near-perfect romantic lead, Meagan Good is quite good and I would watch Gabrielle Union movies all day long if I could. (Also, Wendy Williams has a two-scene cameo.)  Still, the result is pleasant enough, funny enough and romantic enough to be a welcome watch (especially as a chaser after a few days of horror movies, Italian neorealist dramas, and noir films … but your mileage may vary). I liked it better than I thought, and I thought I’d like it a lot.