Breyionna Flowers
MC Contributor
After three months of countless advertisements exhilarating viewers everywhere, “The Perfect Guy” was finally released in theaters on Friday, Sept. 11, 2015. The thriller is the first film of its genre this year to be comprised of a mostly black cast, starring Sanaa Lathan, Michael Ealy, and Morris Chestnut.
The film centers on Leah Vaughn (Sanaa Lathan), a successful businesswoman who is unsatisfied in her relationship with her boyfriend of two years, David King (Morris Chestnut), because he is not ready to commit and start a family. After the couple decides to part ways, Leah meets Carter Duncan (Michael Ealy), an information technology, or IT specialist, who seems to have the qualities in a life partner that she’s been looking for. There’s just one problem: Carter is overly possessive and territorial. After witnessing Carter nearly beat a man to death solely for speaking to her, Leah breaks up with him, and the stalking begins.
Directed by David M. Rosenthal and written Tyger Williams, “The Perfect Guy” quickly turns from one woman’s battle against a psychotic ex-lover to a mediocre BET film that is so self-involved that it overtly crams in as many black stereotypes as it possibly can.
Not to mention, the characters are so underdeveloped that the film does not even bother assigning them to definite careers nor actual character goals. One would almost certainly think that Carter is the main character. After all, viewers find out more about him than Leah, the actual main character.
“I didn’t understand it. The woman, Leah, had a good job, I guess, because she had a nice-sized house, but that’s all I know. I couldn’t tell you anything else about her,” said Kimberly Stampley, a senior mass communication major from Vicksburg, Miss.
When character development fails, why not add stereotypes to cover it up? Leah Vaughn is the independent black woman who is so desperate to marry and start a family that she doesn’t even bother to learn anything about new beau Carter, other than the fact that he has a good job. Carter is the light-skinned crazy, black man, who’s possessive and does not take no for an answer.
Then there’s David, the dark-skinned man with a fear of commitment and apparently no house or job title, since writers made no effort to even give him a real identity.
“I don’t like how they portrayed Morris Chestnut. It made black men, as a whole, look bad. Not only did he not want a family, I’m not even sure he had a real job. I can’t tell you anything about him. Leah was successful, but he was just there,” said Stampley.
“The Perfect Guy” fails to give its characters clear-cut goals outside of the overall theme, which still isn’t clear. The only possible goal set for Lathan’s character in the film is to get married. If that is her goal, what does that say about black women who are mainly portrayed by characters with similar goals? What does it say about black man, whose portrayals in every film this year have contained violence?
There are still audience members who were entertained by such performances since the film ranked #1 and grossed $26.7 million its opening weekend.
