Daddy's Little Girls

"Daddy's Little Girls" is a decent/good movie that could have been a great movie. I say that it is a decent movie because the overall plot was pretty solid and the acting was very good. However, it could have been a great film if the story could have been told with greater detail and the film had been better edited.

Let's put it this way, if T.P. were to have written this film as a school paper, the teacher would have given it a C+. The theme and concept for the paper would have been sound and offered lots of potential – a solid B. However, due to punctuation errors, grammar errors, misspelled words and run-on sentences (For those who took English at Howard U – instant D)….the teacher was being nice to give T.P. a C+.

T.P. has done only one great movie – "Diary Of A Mad Black Woman". The second film was cute. This 3rd film was OK. I will give him the benefit of the doubt for this film, he probably has many other things that he is working on. However, for the next film, he better take the time to write, direct and edit a high quality product.

Monty is an honest black man working as a mechanic, financially supporting his three daughters who live with his ex-wife's mother. When his mother-in-law dies, Monty is left looking after his daughters and takes on extra work as a driver for young, pretty and very successful lawyer Julia. His first day on the job brings disaster though as one of his daughters starts a fire, forcing him to take Julia to the hospital, getting him fired and social services handing his kids to their estranged mother (who lives with the local drug dealer). Monty is forced to go for custody to keep his girls but cannot get a lawyer and only a moment of kindness from Julia sees her take his case for free. While she works with him she begins to fall for his charms despite the gulf in their social status.

I want to be clear that, although I came to this film off the back of The Wire, I did not expect it to be of the same quality (or even the same genre) and I did not come to it with my mind made up or some sort of chip on my shoulder that Elba should only do projects that Wire fans somehow approve of in line with his brilliant turn as Stringer Bell. No, I came to the film because I like him as a screen presence and was happy to see this film for what it was – a romantic drama. In the broad sweep the film is OK in very base terms but the biggest problem with it is evident from the very start. Within a few minutes of the start we have a saintly old woman coughing and come comments made about her health and I immediately said "she's not making it long into this" – fade to her funeral seconds later! This is one example but there are lots of examples of really poor development and convenient narrative jumps. This may not sound like a problem but consider the main thrust of the film is the relationship between Julia and Monty convincing and engaging.

Sadly it never does and it felt like the writers had developed this in about three stages. 1: snotty impatient dislike of Monty; 2: he's not all bad but it's not for me; 3: Monty is the love of my life. The thing is that there is literally nothing between these stages and it feels like a switch has been flicked to move from one to another with the impact on the film being that it simply doesn't feel real. This left me not caring too much about the relationship throughout. The case of the title is similarly unengaging as it doesn't ring true either – it is written to elicit emotions from the viewer but by being so lame it just didn't suck me in or produce any dramatic tension at all. It isn't all bad though because it does have a very basic charm to it and, as a daytime TV movie, it would work really well for the target audience – it is just a shame that that is the best you can say about it because of how poorly written all of it is – the final five minutes being an example of everything being tied up whether it makes total sense or not. I understand that there is an element of Capraesque community fairytale here and I have no problem with that but didn't think it excused it from being "good" in areas of writing, characters and development.

The reason for me coming to the film is one of its few strengths. Elba doesn't get anywhere near the complexity or intensity of Stringer Bell of course (not that the Emmy's would agree with my summary of his acting in that) but he still has a good presence and makes for a lovable lead character. His charm and looks does help the film get away with a lot. The harder acting role is Julia because you have to make this character change convincingly and also be horrid early on without pushing the audience away. The bad news is that this role went to Union, who doesn't have the greatest range. She cannot make it work and her performance is really simple and totally unconvincing as being a real person. Her looks do not help her that much here and the lack of reality in her character breaks the chemistry between her and Elba. The kids are cute and slightly annoying in their delivery, being too obvious in doing what they are doing. Nobody else has much to do – Gossett Jr rolls through in an attempt to add some weight to the film by his name, Smith, Ross, Williams, Vaughn and others all do the basics but not much more.

Daddy's Little Girls is a very basic film that will work best in a few years when you stumble upon on in the middle of TVM stuff in the middle of a weekday but even then it is pretty thin stuff. It relies heavily on Elba and Union's performances, both of whom try their best but don't have decent characters and simply try to charm their way through. The writing is poor as it lacks any flow or development worth talking about and it feels like it was delivered in blocks. Were it funnier, more dramatic or more engaging, this wouldn't matter but the film is not good enough to cover the development problem and it gets dull and silly very quickly with only Afro-Caribbean TVM weepy fans being left loving it.

Daddy's Little Girls is my favorite Tyler Perry film so far. I am a recent fan of Tyler Perry's work my first film being Meet the Browns and ever since I was hooked. Tyler Perry works hard to make his films feel real and he never disappoints. In this film a man is trying to buy a garage while helping his three daughters grandmother take care of them. When tragedy strikes an almost never-ending battle for his children begins. As he must try and get his children back from the clutches of their drug dealing mother he is about to fail. Then a successful yet mean lawyer comes into his life just in time. With her help he might be able get his daughters back and maybe find someone to love just as all hope seemed lost.

This is probably one of Tyler Perry's most realistic films. It has some humor to help lighten the mood and some nice moments to give you a good feeling of whats about to happen.

The biggest problem with this is that it's so totally predictable almost from the very beginning. Is there any surprise that comes up at any point in the entire movie? About the only thing thrown in that threw me off for a few minutes was the rape conviction against Monty (Idris Elba) which ended up being explained away anyway. The basis of the story, of course, was Monty's frantic need to get custody of his 3 daughters back from his ex-wife, who's hooked up with a drug dealer and seems to be into some pretty bad stuff herself. That leads to his budding relationship with Julia (Gabrielle Union) - a high powered lawyer who had employed Monty as her driver for a while, and finds herself strangely drawn to him both personally and professionally, as she ends up representing him. There's a lot of extraneous material thrown in - the community's combination of outrage and impotence against local drug dealers, the wrong side of the tracks romance between Monty and Julia, the situation the kids find themselves in when they're taken away from Monty and handed over to their mother. Sometimes it seemed as if there was a bit too much extraneous material to be honest.

What I liked about the movie was the decision to make the girls' father the good guy, and the fact that the black community living in Monty's neighbourhood was shown to be diverse and mostly good, honest folk with a few losers thrown in. I also liked the performances from Elba and Union - they worked well together - and from the 3 McClain girls (I assume sisters themselves) who played Monty's children. They were as far removed from irritating child actors as you could imagine. They were quite good.

Unfortunately, what I didn't like about this was the predictability of the whole thing. There was virtually no dramatic tension throughout, because you knew without any doubt how pretty much everything was going to turn out. That really drags a movie down in my opinion. (4/10)

No one could ever accuse Tyler Perry of being the soul of subtlety - either as a filmmaker or as a storyteller. His set-ups are often painfully contrived, with characters who are two-dimensional and stereotypical, and messages that are pat and overly simplistic, to put it mildly. Yet, in this era when too many black characters are either rappers, street thugs, prostitutes or drug dealers, Perry speaks to audiences yearning to see a more positive vision of the African-American experience portrayed on screen. That's certainly an admirable goal, but the problem is that Perry himself is not above indulging in many of those very same stereotypes if, in so doing, it helps him to get his message across.

In "Daddy's Little Girls," the first ethnic stereotype Perry admirably endeavors to shatter is that of the absent or indifferent urban black father. His protagonist, Monty, is a divorced dad of three who works as an auto mechanic in a garage run by none other than Louis Gossett Jr. Monty's ex has pretty much flown the coop, leaving the kids to be raised by her mother who is currently dying of lung cancer. After the woman's death, Jennifer decides she now wants to raise the children, even though she's living with a gangsta' boyfriend who's so low he even sells drugs to the kids in the neighborhood schoolyard. This sets up a fierce custody battle between Monty and Jennifer with the three girls caught in the middle.

As stated previously, it is commendable that Perry wishes to make Monty a model for young male viewers to emulate, but in order to establish Monty's bona fides as a caring father, the filmmaker for some reason has found it necessary to ratchet up the mother's vileness past the point of believability. In fact, Jennifer makes Cinderella's evil stepmother look like June Cleaver and Carol Brady in comparison. Indeed, she is so over-the-top in her villainy that one wonders how such a seemingly level-headed and sweet-tempered soul as Marty could ever have been fooled into marrying her.

Perry doesn't do much better with the main female character, a snooty, high-priced African-American lawyer named Julia, who looks down her nose on poor working-class stiffs like Monty who takes a position as her much-abused chauffeur in order to make a little money on the side. Monty soon discovers that all the over-stressed Julia needs is a good man to bring meaning to her sterile, empty life. Thus, with the character of Julia, Perry manages to insult blacks, career women and specifically black career women in one fell swoop.

The movie makes some interesting points about the role class consciousness plays in the black community, with wealthy blacks sometimes more dismissive of their less well-off counterparts than are wealthy whites. Unfortunately, this theme is played out in the context of a fairly formulaic romance between Monty and Julia, with the "little girls" of the title reduced to not much more than walk-on roles in the story. Idris Elba is appealing and solid as the sincere, hardworking Monty, while Gabrielle Union does what she can with the poorly written part of Julia.

The narrative also suffers from what first-year screen writing students (or "Crash" deriders) like to refer to as "coincidence overload," with characters bumping into one another at all-too-convenient moments or just happening to learn crucial bits of information from news stories on TV.

"Daddy's Little Girls" starts off with the best of intentions, and there are certainly some poignant, touching moments to be found in the film, but the movie is so fixated on pandering to the emotions of its audience, especially in the melodramatic final reel, that most of the goodwill one brings to the project has pretty much evaporated by the time the closing credits come rolling by.