The Six Triple Eight (now streaming on Netflix) is the lesser-traveled of Tyler Perry’s three primary tonal modes: the sincere stab at prestige filmmaking. (The other two? Preposterous thrillers and stupidass comedies.) This is his first BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie, about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a group of Black women in the U.S. Army who, during World War II, unclogged a backlog of 17 million pieces of mail intended for soldiers overseas and their families back home. The story sorta splits time between two main characters based on real people, Kerry Washington as 6888 honcho Major Charity Adams, and Ebony Obsidian as battalion member Lena Derriecott King. So will Tyler Perry, you know, Tyler Perry this one, or will it actually be good? Let’s find out.
The Gist: We open on – well, let’s just say Perry’s ability to stage a WWII battle scene is questionable. I mean, it’s pretty obvious the guys who fly through the air after a bomb explodes are attached to wires that have been digitally removed. A U.S. fighter plane rendered from unconvincing CGI crashes and a soldier pulls a blood-stained letter from the dead pilot’s pocket, which is a staple cliche of WWII movies (that, or a blood-stained photo of wives or children or mamas, or all of the above). The letter ends up in a mail sack thrown atop a massive pile of such sacks, which fill an airplane hangar. That was Dec., 1943, but now we jump back in time a year or so, to Bloomfield, Pennsylvania. Lena (Obsidian) has to push past a sneering, judgy blonde White girl who can’t BELIEVE a Black girl would DARE consort with a White guy, namely, Abram (Gregg Sulkin). They’re not BF/GF really, but they have fun together, pretending they’re piloting a plane as he drives his convertible and she whoops it up in the rumble seat.
Abram dreams of being a pilot, so he joined the military to take on Hitler from the cockpit of a fighter plane. On the eve of his departure, he gives Lena a promise ring and they finally smooch lips, and she pines hard for him while he’s gone. She sends him letter after letter but curiously never gets a reply, but before you jump to the conclusion that he’s moved on or dead, Perry gives us several scenes illustrating that getting no mail from the boys abroad is a typical occurrence for many worried families Stateside. And THEN we learn that Abram is dead. Stricken with grief, Lena tells her auntie and mother that she’s enlisting “to go fight Hitler,” and will join a contingent of the Army for Black women who understandably feel the need to serve their country.
The contingent is led by Charity Adams (Washington), who barks at the recruits to stand up straight and make their beds and be ready to work their tails off and all that, and so we get the standard-issue assholes-and-elbows boot camp section of the movie, where Lena struggles mightily to army-crawl through mudholes, privates get chewed out by their superiors and the little group surrounding our protag conforms to war-movie stereotypes: the outspoken one (Shanice Shantay), the prudish one (Pepi Sonuga), the sensible one (Sarah Jeffrey), etc. Adams picks on poor Lena, who stands out because she’s slight of build and can’t quite keep up with the group. But Adams is fed up on a larger scale too, since she’s whipped her unit into shape, but still gets no respect from all the White men in charge, who spew condescension and bigotry from mouth-holes blathering above six or seven pasty chins, and refuse to send a group of Black women soldiers overseas to do anything important.
At this point, we’re subject to a moment when a guffaw involuntarily leaps from our throats upon seeing Susan Sarandon in a get-up that even the rinky-dinkiest community theater group would deem too amateurish: painted-on eyebrows, terrible wig and a dental prosthetic that makes her look like she’s trying to swallow an old piano. This is a caricature of Eleanor Roosevelt, who convenes alongside President of the USA Franklin Roosevelt (Sam Waterston) and civil rights leader Mary McCleod Bethune (Oprah Winfrey!), who are also victims of the film’s pathetic costuming department. The topic of discussion is the mail conundrum mentioned earlier, and General Halt (Dean Norris) sneers at Bethune but nevertheless has to listen to the boss of the country and figure out a way to solve this problem. So he sends some grocery clerks on an errand, assigning Adams and Lena and the rest of the squad to Scotland to tackle an impossible task just so he can watch them fail. BARELY ALMOST A SPOILER ALERT: It’s less impossible than you think, Gen. Halt, you POS!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Perry’s other stabs at earnest drama are A Jazzman’s Blues and his adaptation of the beloved play For Colored Girls – both of which are superior to the sloppy, cornball Six Triple Eight. Also, Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures told the story of underappreciated Black women far, far better than this.
Performance Worth Watching: I liked Shantay as the take-no-guff soldier who enlivens the proceedings with a little welcome brassiness, and there’s no denying Washington and Obsidian’s earnestness.
Memorable Dialogue: “I feel like the clock nobody can wind,” laments Lena in the midst of an emotional breakdown.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: The Six Triple Eight is par for the course for Perry, who gives the ol’ college try to a new genre for him, the war movie, and Tyler Perrys it up with coagulated-Velveeta dialogue, raggedy editing, silly caricatures, clunky pacing and hackneyed material handcuffing a game, talented cast. This doesn’t strike me as ineptitude, but rather a general disregard for the quality of the final product – something that infects so much of Perry’s output. Among many things, he’s known for being prolific, and this, his third directorial effort of the year (following the similarly slapdash Mea Culpa and Divorce in the Black), further suggests that he’s more concerned with saving costs by skimping on costuming, VFX and second drafts of scripts than he is with telling a visually coherent story outside the bounds of genre generica.
It feels better to ascribe good intentions to Perry’s attempt at shining a light on an unsung story of World War II, the likes of which frequently make for engaging films. But I can’t help but balk at the notion, considering the quality-control issues and the bevy of cliches in Perry’s screenplay (based on reportage by Kevin M. Hymel in WWII History magazine), which ladles out mawkish sentiment like beans on the soup line, and uneasily straddles the line between tribute and exploitation; an extended coda shows us footage of the real Lena Derriecott King, who passed away in Jan. 2024 just shy of her 101st birthday, before reiterating all the plot points that were made painfully obvious during the prior two hours. There’s no assertion about the ugliness of racism or the plucky stick-to-itiveness of disrespected folk that Perry doesn’t feel the need to underscore with needless repetition, pointing big flashing neon arrows at his grossly simplistic themes. It’s embarrassing for those caught in the gears of this jalopy, like Winfrey, Sarandon and Norris are; that Washington and Obsidian work through their characters’ big, broad emotional beats to emerge relatively unscathed seems like a small miracle.
Our Call: This is an excellent idea for a movie, poorly executed. Six Triple NAY. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.