Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tyler Perry’s Duplicity’ on Amazon Prime Video, a thriller that uses a police shooting as a springboard for unchecked silliness (2025)

I have long been befuddled by Tyler Perry’s creative strategy and methodology, and Tyler Perry’s Duplicity (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) may have finally offered a breakthrough. After enduring yet another among his many, many stupifying melodramatic thrillers, I’ve arrived at the answer to the age-old question, Does Tyler Perry know what the hell he’s doing? And that answer is (drumroll please): Yes and no. I know. But bear with me here: Yes, he absolutely knows how silly, superficial and over the top these movies are; it has to be intentional, for his goal is to entertain. But no, he doesn’t know what he’s doing from a technical filmmaking standpoint in order to make these ree-dick-you-luss things more watchable. I’m convinced that, on the latter point, he just doesn’t care; quality writing and directing demands more time and effort than he’s apparently willing to expend, since he cranks out multiple movies and TV series every year like he’s got a life-or-death quota to reach. Which is a long way of saying, no, Duplicity does not buck a single Tyler Perry trend – not that we should expect it to, anyway.

TYLER PERRY’S DUPLICITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Before we Get Into It, it must be revealed that Tyler Perry’s trying a little something different with this movie by using a highly sensitive real-life societal problem as the basis for his trademark bevy of moronic plot twists. The scene: Rodney (Joshua Adeyeye), it’s important to note, is a Black man wearing a hoodie. He’s presumably out for a jog, but he detours into a posh neighborhood and an old White lady spots him entering her neighbor’s backdoor so she calls 911. Two cops, Kevin (RonReaco Lee), who’s Black, and rookie officer Caleb (Jimi Stanton), who’s White, arrive on the scene. They mistake Rodney’s cell phone for a gun, Kevin shouts “Gun! Gun!” and Caleb shoots Rodney dead. Now, most movies would emphasize the anger and sorrow many feel in the face of such an occurrence, the likes of which happens far, far too often in America. But this being a Tyler Perry movie, you know it’s going to have nothing of substance to say about the topic beyond it sure is awful when bad things happen, or, more specific to this incident, it’s bad when people die. We don’t watch Tyler Perry movies for deep thoughts on complex social problems, and that’s almost certainly Tyler Perry’s intent.

Rodney’s wife is Fela (Meagan Tandy), a TV morning-show anchor who should absolutely get her producer fired after she unexpectedly reads her husband’s name during a breaking news report. The fact that someone fed the report into her teleprompter without telling her first or pulling her off the air or doing anything within the realm of common sense is the least preposterous plot point in this movie, so let’s not get hung up on it. And that includes the array of characters within Fela’s sphere: Her bestie Marley (Kat Graham), who’s actually the primary protagonist of this slop-ass screenplay, was also close to Rodney, and she happens to be a high-powered attorney who vows to get Fela justice via a massive settlement from the city. Fela’s boyfriend is Tony (Tyler Lepley), now a private investigator, formerly a cop who was unjustly railroaded off the force, and is still tight enough with Kevin to get insider info from him. Fela’s co-anchor Shannon (Shannon LaNier) and Sam (Nick Barrotta) commit to journalistically investigating the incident and sharing their gatherings with Marley. And the most influential character is Tyler Perry, who doesn’t have a visible on-screen role, but as the writer of this junk, he’s absolutely present at all times, having granted himself the omniscient power of puppeteering his characters through this plot without once considering the logjam of conflicts among his characters’ various interests, or the brain-melting contrivance of it all.

Meanwhile, the plot plays lip service to the riots breaking out in Atlanta over the shooting, which gives Marley some leverage for her legal threats, but the movie’s too cheap to show us any of this. Why would we want to see that stuff anyway, when we can just hear Tyler Perry rubbing his hands together as he formulates an onslaught of halfwit twists and his inevitable trademark, Tyler Perry’s Imbecilic Ending? Marley pokes around, and Tony pokes around, and Sam and Shannon poke around, and boy do they get somewhere, first to the initial twist, which I won’t reveal, but one look at the movie title and you’ll see it coming leagues and eons before the characters do (hint: it’s not the part of the title that reads Tyler Perry’s). Tyler Perry nearly breaks his damn back in an attempt to make all the characters assume the illusion of complexity, especially within the context of a police shooting, but the truth is, they’re plot devices first, and recognizable human beings doing recognizable things that recognizable human beings do, last. If you can set that aside, you might appreciate this movie, but I’d never ask you to benchpress a blue whale, because that’s just absurd.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Acrimony, A Fall From Grace, Mea Culpa, Divorce in the Black and Duplicity find Tyler Perry on a hell of a female-led preposterous-thriller tear in the past half-decade or so.

Performance Worth Watching: Graham guts it out. Good for her. Work is work.

Memorable Dialogue: Trust me, this line, dropped by a single-use non sequitur character, is even more hilarious in context: “Do you think I got dementia? I know what the hell I’m saying. Can I sue her for feeding the geese?”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Only Tyler Perry would have the chutzpah to exploit an all-too-real situation of disturbing racial tension for the sake of a rug-pulling thriller, but really, who’s surprised that he doesn’t seem to have considered that it might be distasteful? To be fair, he seems nominally interested in the moral and sociopolitical gray areas of the situation, and comes close to wrestling with the slippery manner in which American society defines and addresses racism. But it’ll surprise no one when he pulls focus on things that matter to indulge his usual preposterous-thriller tomfoolery, thus rendering his simplistic portrayal of racial dynamics moot, buried in the rubble of a violent and brainless eyeroller of a conclusion – the type of conclusion that some might find hilarious, if its unintentional comedy hadn’t been undermined by a police-shooting plot.

Not that anyone would ever take a Tyler Perry movie seriously, mind you (even his more earnest outings like The Six Triple Eight or For Colored Girls tend to be viewed with hey-nice-try condescension, and they’re so ham-fisted, they kind of deserve it). Duplicity checks all the boxes of Tyler Perry’s signature blend of apathetic and inept filmmaking: Awkwardly staged scenes, clumsy dialogue, cheap visual effects, grandiose slo-mo, outrageously stupid plot, etc. It features a subtitle reading FOUR MONTHS LATER and about 10 seconds later has a character say, “It’s been four months!” It’s frustratingly directionless in its storytelling, wavering between Fela and Marley as protagonists early on, and taking nearly an hour to find its narrative footing, because inert, dead-ass scenes keep making the plot stall out like someone keeps crimping the gas line to the carburetor.

Tyler Perry’s deals with Amazon and Netflix have resulted in zero of his feature films getting theatrical release since 2019; the direct-to-streaming junkyard is perfect for his visual aesthetic, which remains mired in ’90s pre-widescreen television. Storytelling-wise, he cranks out plots and dumps his product into the rapid churn of content, where a lot of stuff that doesn’t deserve to be forgotten is forgotten. As Duplicity illustrates, Tyler Perry’s stuff is almost designed to be forgotten, a fitting fate for far too many of his movies.

Our Call: Tyler Perry’s Duplicity takes a decidedly wrongheaded step toward addressing relevant subject matter. I’m sure we’re surprised by the effort — but not at all surprised that the movie is bad. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.