Acrimony (2018)

Gimly

5.0

Oct 4, 2018

If you had just copped the line notes on _Acrimony_, you could be forgiven for assuming this was your average Lifetime movie faire, but _Acrimony_ allows for its core characters a complexity that you would never find in that sort. There are absolutely imperfections in the movie, most of which I assume come to us from budgetary constraints, and even those aside, _Acrimony_ is still not exactly breaking moulds or blazing trail - but it is decent, and not exactly like anything I personally have seen before. _Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._

It’s always a bad sign when the first thing we see in a movie is the dictionary definition of the title. It’s bad because it assumes that we’re too ignorant to know what the word means — in this case, ‘acrimony,’ which I would say ranks lowish in the Hemingway-Faulkner scale —, and why would we want to watch a film that underestimates, sight unseen, our intelligence? Moreover, if writer/director Tyler Perry deems his chosen title to be so obscure that he had best not even risk giving us the benefit of the doubt, why didn’t he pick another, more accesible word — one that he feels is common…