Movie Review: The Perfect Match
I had arrived at the cinema to see X-Men: Apocalypse but the time schedule indicated I had arrived too early. With a couple of hours to go before its showing time, I settled for The Perfect Match to kill time.
You know how you can tell if a movie is going to be good or not just from the names of the actors starring in it or from its opening credits/sequence. You can also tell a black movie just from its opening credits/sequence. At the first glimpse of the opening credits just from the fonts of the graphics, I groaned at the prospect of being stuck watching another black movie. I have nothing against black movies generally. But specifically, I have a thing against black movies that deal with the theme of The Perfect Match.
It’s a theme that has been done to the death in black movies so much so that it would be a fair assessment to say that back movies own the franchise on it. The theme of non-committal love relationships and marriage in all its variations is a staple feature in 9 out of 10 black movies. When a black movie is not exploring this theme, it is either exploring a drug/gang violence theme or a theme about “how the man done gone do us wrong”. It makes you wonder sometimes whether such themes as science fiction and political drama explored in white movies are alien to black life.
The storyline in the Perfect Match ventures into familiar territory. A group of 2 black couples and one single guy who have been friends from childhood or school (I can’t remember now) are at a dinner engaged in the kind of conversation peculiar to black folk in black movies. One couple is married without kids and another couple is engaged to be married. The single guy is the resident lothario who prefers one night stands to a committed relationship.
Predictably, our lothario’s buddies bet with him that if he commits to one woman for a month heading to one of his buddies’ wedding, he’d fall in love. In keeping with the predictability of this genre of movies, the bet happened to have been made within earshot of a lady our lothario becomes enamoured of. From thereon out, the movie goes through the usual genre motions; the predictable wooing stage, the give in to our lothario’s charm, the contrived soft-pornish love scenes set to slow mood-setting R & B music, the romantic photo shoot sessions, the break up and the eventual denouement which draws on some poorly-contrived psycho-babble about unresolved grieving issues arising from the loss of his parents to conveniently explain our lothario’s relationship commitment phobia.
As the movie’s protagonist, Terence Jenkins seemed too nice-guyish to be convincing as a serial lothario with commitment phobia and even less so as one suffering from a burden of unresolved grieving issues. For all the acting chops he brought into playing his character, he could very well have been on the sets of BET’s 106 & Park and E News reading his lines from the teleprompter.
Donald Faison is forever damned to being Turk from Scrubs in every movie he appears in and that’s exactly what he was in this movie sans, of course his, blue scrubs. The voluptuous Dascha Polanko was either unimpressive or nondescript or whichever of the two conveys a worse description. Brandy’s cameo as the aptly-named diva, Avatia, was as unimpressive as it was totally unnecessary.
The Perfect Man takes its unimpressive place in a long line of black movies that have dealt with a theme that’s been done to the death in black movies that it’s a wonder more movies are still being made around the theme without a thought to infusing some originality into it. If you have got time to kill before seeing a preferred movie, The Perfect Man might come in handy as a time killer.5/10
