Another day, another Netflix film that’s shot to #1 on the platform in the US despite falling flat with critics and viewers. This time, the movie in question is director Tyler Perry’s newly released Mea Culpa, which has picked up some pretty disastrous scores on Rotten Tomatoes despite dominating on the streaming giant.
I, like many of the viewers I see berating the movie online, wanted to like Mea Culpa if nothing else for the radiant presence of Kelly Rowland. Here, she plays criminal defense attorney Mea Harper who takes on the case of a seductive artist accused of murdering his girlfriend. Unfortunately, though, not even the presence of the former Destiny’s Child singer can save this film, with Rotten Tomatoes reviewers largely in agreement that both the script and acting are pretty weak.
Which, if you ask me, is a little ironic, considering Perry recently made news for being so horrified at the advancements OpenAI is making, particularly with its new Sora video generation tool, that the director decided to put his $800 million studio expansion on hold. Presumably, because AI is rapidly lowering the bar — and the price tag! — for content creation, so much so that AI could probably already script a much better version of Mea Culpa than Perry came up with (that last part is obviously my own surmise, but Perry’s got to be thinking something similar).
“This idea came to me because I love all of those older thrillers from the ’80s and ’90s,” Perry said in a Netflix promotional interview about his new movie. “It was fun to explore the best and worst of humanity through the genre of an exotic thriller.”
The movie’s #1 showing, by the way, is certainly not the first time this has happened on the streamer. Quite often, enough viewers try out a new Netflix title to send it to #1 — only for them to recoil at what they’ve watched and drown it in bad takes and reviews.
Mea Culpa is Perry’s fourth project for Netflix, and he’s currently working #5. That one is Six Triple Eight, the true story about the first and only Women’s Army Corps unit of color to be stationed overseas during World War II, and it stars Kerry Washington. Hopefully, it’ll turn out better than Mea Culpa, which one X/Twitter user slammed as “one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen … Tubi originals are better.”