‘The Six Triple Eight’ review: overacted war film that emphasizes the message

Director: Tyler Perry | Script: Tyler Perry | Cast: Ebony Obsidian (Lena Derriecott), Kerry Washington (Charity Adams), Kylie Jefferson (Bernice Baker), Shanice Shantay (Johnnie May), Sarah Jeffery (Dolores Washington), Dean Norris (Generaal Halt), Susan Sarandon (Eleanor Roosevelt), each one | Playing time: 127 minutes | Year: 2024

In the first scene of The six triple eight In reality, things are already bad. The camera pans behind a platoon of American soldiers waiting for the enemy in a trench, rifles at the ready. However, the helmets and uniforms are too clean. There’s a speck of mud here and there, but it’s very clear that these extras come straight from the costume department. It feels fake. This kind of sloppiness in execution immediately puts this film at a zero-one disadvantage. And unfortunately there is nothing better.

It’s more boring, because in the rest of the movie there is little to see about the war, except that everyone constantly talks about it. The six triple eight This is the US Army battalion of the same name, whose greatest merit was that the associated soldiers expedited the delivery of mail between the combat front and the home front. They devised methods to find out names and addresses and repair packages that were headed to the front and had been in a warehouse for an eternity. Within six months they had cleared the backlog and sent seventeen million pieces of mail to the correct destination.

This merit should not be downplayed, because a letter from a loved one can work wonders in times of war, but, of course, it is not a truly exciting activity. No, the tension in this movie comes from a different angle. This battalion was made up exclusively of black women, the only unit with such a composition to be deployed overseas (from an American perspective) during World War II.

The six triple eight It’s mainly about the discrimination that women had to endure and that’s not to say. This begins on the train on the way to training camp in Georgia, where an officer picks up the white recruits to seat them in another compartment. Later, almost all the white men they encounter in the military openly work against them, including the executive staff and the chaplain sent to the battalion by those same staff. However, the unit’s captain, Charity Adams, knows how to give the right response to all those misogynistic racists.

This is a true story and all the characters really existed (or still exist), but the execution is so over the top and unsubtle that it almost completely destroys the credibility of the story. The women of Six Triple Eight are without exception noble, empathetic, and resourceful, while their male counterparts are downright idiots and idiots. Dean Norris in particular, never shy about playing an annoying antagonist, portrays his General Halt as the most racist racist in a racist land. Everything could have been a little less.

On the other hand, a film like this also aims, as if it were a demolishing hammer, to introduce ideas into the viewer’s senses. At the end of the film, the Six Triple Eight’s achievements are casually listed three times in a row, and to underline the filmmakers’ intentions, even Oprah Winfrey has been tapped for a supporting role. Then you will know.

So anyone who wants to wallow in an anti-discrimination message and take for granted the simplistic stories, impeccable uniforms and overly exaggerated ways of acting can still enjoy this. Or maybe even be inspired by it. To everyone else, Edward is Zwicks. Glory since 1989 a better option.

The six triple eight can be seen in netflix.