Perry blunts powerful 'For Colored Girls'

When a Tyler Perry movie actually gets screened for critics, you know it must be something special.

“For Colored Girls” is special, especially for a Tyler Perry movie.

It offers a sterling cast of actresses who act their hearts out, using the rough and tumble poetry of Ntozake Shange's stage play to vent their anger and lament their disappointments in modern Shakespearean soliloquies delivered in rumbles of quiet thunder.

“For Colored Girls” also represents a big step for actor/director/writer/producer Perry, whose string of financially successful (mostly) comedies (“Madea's Family Reunion,” “Why Did I Get Married?” and others) never ventured beyond stock characters and dull, constrained visuals tailor-made for TV.

Perry steps way, way out of his comfort zone to make “For Colored Girls,” a project slightly beyond his storytelling limitations, and he winds up treating Shange's creation as a Tyler Perry movie on raging hormones.

Perry isn't up to epic mode here, so he falls back on what he knows, and that means more stock characters and visual flairlessness. But not nearly as stock and flairless as his previous works.

“For Colored Girls” follows an ensemble of nine African American women who, unlike the geographically scattered characters in Shange's 1975 Tony-nominated “choreo-poem,” now all live in Harlem apartments, except for Jo (Janet Jackson), a publishing magnate whose male-ego driven hubby (Omari Hardwick) has not been faithful.

Kimberly Elise plays Crystal, the closest to a lead character. She works to support her two kids and violently abusive, messed-up war vet boyfriend (Michael Healy).

Down the hall, a bartender named Tangie (Thandie Newton) engages in anonymous sex to fill some emotional voids, when she's not clashing with her religious nut-job mother (Whoopi Goldberg) or her suddenly pregnant, goodie-two-shoes kid sister (Tessa Thompson).

Loretta Devine brings bombast to her relationship counselor, a wounded woman who can't heed her own advice and keeps giving away her “stuff” to duplicitous men.

Anika Noni Rose plays an upbeat dance instructor about to get a new set of moves. Meanwhile, Kerry Washington plays a guilt-stricken child welfare agent who can't conceive, even though she apparently has the only honorable husband in Harlem (Hill Harper).

The most motherly character in the building is the manager, played by Phylicia Rashad with more depth and steel than the role calls for.

Perry wrangles this overpopulated ensemble movie to the mat, hammering the characters into digestible bits and presenting their situations as a laundry list of laments involving abortion, rape, betrayal, abuse, abandonment, child murder and molestation.

“For Colored Girls” does contain a few shocking moments. How could it not with every woman's nightmares neatly packaged into a dense 134 minutes?

You'd think with all these Shakespearean elements at play, “For Colored Girls” would be the emotional epic that Perry imagines it should be.

Is it ambitious? Does it have periodic eruptions of excellence? Yes and yes.

But every time this soap-operatic movie thrusts for greatness, the director manages to Perry it.

“For Colored Girls”

<p>Rating: ★ ★ ½</p>

<p>Starring: Whoopi Goldberg, Thandie Newton, Janet Jackson, Kimberly Elise, Phylicia Rashad, Loretta Devine, Kerry Washington, Anika Noni Rose, Macy Gray, Hill Harper</p>

<p>Directed by: Tyler Perry</p>

<p>Other: A Lionsgate release. Rated R for language, nudity, sexual situations, violence. 134 minutes</p>