Tasha Smith

  • Why Did I Get Married Too? (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m not going to be too hard on writer-director Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too?, because the film is slightly more aware of what it’s trying to do than its prequel. Picking up a few years after the previous film, this one once again sends four couples to a holiday destination (trading snowy Colorado for a Bahamas resort) where various secrets and resentments bubble up to the surface (again) and threaten their couples (again). Once more, the film only spends a fraction of its time at the holiday resort, and gets its characters back in their lives for the remainder of the film. Having been written for the screen, this sequel doesn’t have the same claim to theatrical space/time unity as the first film, and doesn’t spend as long at the secluded location—so the shift back to a multi-set approach isn’t as severe, even if it’s still clunky. Most of all, though, is that the characters are more sharply defined, with some of them clearly intended to be comic character. The ever-gorgeous Tasha Smith, for instance, plays a character clearly not meant to be on the same level of realism as the other couples, and her over-the-top screeching arguments with her husband (escalating to a very funny scene in which she shoots a gun in her own house) are played for laughs more than drama. The contrast between her fight scenes and other fight scenes rather works—although it does show Perry going back to his usual writing style, in which he can’t keep his tone consistent. Smith’s character clearly went from grating to amusing, though… which is more than I can say for other characters in the film. I was aghast, for instance, at Perry’s insistence on painting Janet Jackson’s character as a victim—for instance, in not splitting writing income equally even as her husband’s income is on the table (under Quebec law, she would clearly lose that claim). The film then does on to portray her becoming increasingly unhinged until a tragic death… for which she doesn’t even get blamed. In fact, the film hands her Dwayne Johnson as a surprise reward in the film’s last scene, which leaves a sour taste. Jackson gets both one very good glass-smashing scene and one very bad car-smashing one under that subplot, which is about par for the course in Perry’s uneven writing. Perry’s direction is also frustratingly inconsistent: He’s willing to go for two memorable one-shots, for instance, but unable to provide even a contextual medium shot during lengthy conversation scenes. And so it goes—some material is incredibly predictable, while other plot points seem to scream SURPRISE with a deliberate avoidance of foreshadowing, and one inexplainable appearance by a character from the previous film that makes no sense except as a screenwriter’s contrivance. The ending certainly feels far too convenient, sweeping under the rug a number of issues that should have been resolved in more organic ways. Why Did I Get Married Too? Is a slightly better film than its predecessor—buoyed by three years’ worth of additional cinematic experience for Perry, plus his entertainer’s instincts to give the fans what they’re expecting. It’s a bit of a shame for the characters that, by appearing in a sequel, they’re guaranteed to have a bad time—but that’s the movies.

  • Running Out of Time (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) In watching Running Out of Time, I think I’m closing the filmography of writer-director Chris Stokes’s feature-film work for the BET channel. I’ve written elsewhere of my growing awareness of Stokes as a filmmaker and my ongoing disappointment in his work, but I have to admit that Running Out of Time is a high note. While he’s still riffing off a very familiar concept—this time around, a home invasion in which our characters are threatened by bad guys about a secret they don’t know about—, there’s some welcome effectiveness to the opening half of the film. None of it is subtle and some of it borders on overdone, such as the voice of one of the masked antagonists. Much of Running Out of Time is predictable—the mid-turn twist isn’t impressive, and there’s a sense that (as in other Stokes films) the screenplay is simply playing with big broad ideas while not having much to say on its own. Things decline throughout the third act, especially as the action moves outside the house, breaks the tight spatial unity of the story, and steadily dissipates to be replaced with increasingly cheaper attempts to ape better films. The epilogue is baffling—fast-forwarding a few months later for nothing more than a coup de grace that could have been administered earlier and with much less fuss. (So how did she get that top-secret assassination device? There’s an entirely other film in that.)  Tasha Smith looks great, walks around in lingerie but doesn’t have much of a character (not, apparently, much in terms of directing attention) to get into. Running Out of Time is, to be clear, not that good. But when put against other Stokes films for BET, it’s slightly tighter, slightly less ridiculous, slightly more effective. It’s still a significant notch below comparable thrillers, but it’s not as terrible as it could have been.