Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mea Culpa’ on Netflix, a Punny Erotic Thriller From The Twisted Mind of Tyler Perry

Mea Culpa (now on Netflix) is a movie about a woman named Mea who’s a lawyer, and that kind of werdplay should absolutely confirm that it’s a Tyler Perry endeavor. I mean, he made a movie called A Fall from Grace that was about a woman named Grace who fell from grace, and a TV series called House of Payne that was about a family whose surname was Payne. Puns! Notably, Grace was the first release in Perry’s deal with Netflix, which has so far yielded a Madea movie, a halfway-decent stab at dramatic legitimacy (A Jazzman’s Blues) and the two aforementioned Preposterous Thrillers, which could go head-to-head in a truly slammin’ preposterous-off. Good thing about these movies being on Netflix is, you’re at home and your liquor cabinet’s nearby.

MEA CULPA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet Mea (Kelly Rowland, of Destiny’s Child and storming out of the Today show because J-Lo stole her green room fame) during a tense couples-therapy session. Things ain’t going well with hubby Kal (Sean Sagar). She saw him holding hands with another woman. He got fired from his job because he kept showing up drunk. He’s in rehab. She pays all the bills. Even worse, his mother Azalia (Kerry O’Malley) hates Mea. HATES her. Azalia has cancer and therefore nobody calls her out on her nastiness. Kal’s brother Ray (Nick Sagar) also hates Mea, but at least his wife Charlise (Shannon Thornton) is her bestie. Why do they hate her? Dunno. No reason. Maybe because Tyler Perry wrote the screenplay and what he says goes, even if it doesn’t make sense. He’s damn terrific at slapdashing out screenplays that don’t make sense. Anyway, bottom line, sucks to be Mea. 

Mea’s a Highly Successful Lawyer. But her personal and professional lives blur together when she agrees to defend Zyair Malloy (Trevante Rhodes), a suspected murderer being prosecuted by Ray, a DA who’s running for mayor on a tough-on-crime platform. Now, the only reason I can come up with as to why she’d take the case despite the potential conflict of interest is, Tyler Perry wrote the screenplay and what he says goes, even if it doesn’t make sense. This wouldn’t be much of a Preposterous Thriller if she said no. But ain’t it rich? And it gets richer: Zyair is a famous painter who’s accused of killing his girlfriend. No body was found, but blood in his apartment and skull fragments in one of his paintings matched the woman’s DNA. He denies doing it of course, but all the schmevidence is piling up against him.

So Mea and her investigator go visit Zyair in his loft apartment that can only be accessed by an old freight elevator. “You did something to her – sex, right?” the investigator asks Zyair, and we all laugh our asses off. Who talks like that? Nobody ever, unless you’re a character in a Tyler Perry movie. Thing is, Zyair is a smoldering hunk of muscle. “Yes, I do love sex,” he says in a manner that implies he’s actually bored by sex. He might be bored by everything else, too, because he says everything in this manner. Perhaps he’s bored with this lousy-ass screenplay. He also manages to worm into Mea’s psyche enough to learn that she’s not happy in her marriage, and this is when Perry tries to force EROTIC SEXUAL TENSION into the character dynamic using everything short of a crowbar and a 300-gallon vat of Vaseline. “Admit it. You find me attractive,” a sleepy Zyair says to Mea, which leads to her delivering the immortal line, “Do you wanna die of lethal injection? Stay focused!” Will she sleep with the suspected murderer, and make all the complicated things even more complicated? NO SPOILERS, but we’ll surely never get to the trademark Tyler Perry Hyperventilatingly Stoopid Ending if she doesn’t.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Mea Culpa so badly wants to be like an ’80s erotic thriller, it should be titled Tyler Perry’s Faytyl Attraction.

Performance Worth Watching: Kudos to Rowland for holding it together while the camera was rolling, like a true pro. 

Memorable Dialogue: The classic moment when the movie gains self-awareness: “This sounds ridiculous,” a character says, long, long, long after things have moved past ridiculous into outright inanity.

Sex and Skin: Multiple instances of nudeness; a scene in which we learn that Zyair likes to get sex-ay by smearing paint all over his sexual partner, because he’s an artist, see, and when an artist makes love, a bed becomes a canvas, or a canvas becomes a bed, and the end result should be hung in the sexiest sex hall in the Louvre. 

Our Take: Mea Culpa manages to be both preposterous and stultifyingly dull, which is an impressive feat. Perry takes all the superficial components of erotic thrillers – attractive cast, moody lighting in Zyair’s f—loft, a hump-me soundtrack, lascivious situations goosed by characters with lusty kinks – and shows he doesn’t know what the hell he should do with them. The writing is so sloppy, Rowland and Rhodes are lost at sea, playing characters who act without any identifiable earthly rationale, therefore rendering their psychosexy cat-and-mouse game dead on arrival. When they’re together, the pheromones should burst off the screen, but instead we get the musty whiff of taxidermy as they stand stiff in awkwardly blocked scenes while the score insists that they’re microseconds away from ripping each other’s clothes off with their teeth. I was unconvinced. 

Of course you probably know this isn’t at all far removed from typical Perry productions, which are identifiable by their visual and thematic sloppiness: Plot holes plot holes plot holes, sequences are dashed together in the editing room, performances are either mummified or eye-bulging cartoonz, and the melodrama is so overheated, it makes The Bold and the Beautiful look like The Zone of Interest. And the ending – hoo boy. Perry is known to cook up some doozies, and this one is a real stupifier, cluttered with butcher knives and car wrecks and twists so dreadfully moronic, you just want to scream. Is Perry trying to create concentrated high-octane camp, or is it accidental? Who the hell can tell? Hopefully, by the time you get to the Looney Tunes finale, you’re drunk enough to enjoy it.

Our Call: I want to get some hearty laffs from a guilty pleasure, but Mea Culpa is just too dumb for this world. SKIP IT. 

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