The Six Triple Eight Review – True Story of Heroic Black Women Battalions Not Living | Drama movie

This contributions to black women’s history have often been overlooked, so it’s always encouraging when a filmmaker tries to redress the balance. Theodore Melfi did it with Hidden Figures (2016), which dramatized the role of three black female mathematicians in the 1960s NASA space program. Now writer-director Tyler Perry (best known for Diary of a Mad Black Woman and that Madea series) takes on a similarly moving, if slightly less glamorous, true story: the clearing of a huge backlog of World War II mail to and from American troops fighting in Europe by a battalion of dedicated black women from the Women’s Army Corps, who faced widespread institutional racism and sexism.

Unfortunately, Perry drenches the story with his signature syrupy ineptitude, creating a bleak, booming slog. It doesn’t help that the performances are wildly uneven: Kerry Washington brings a steely magnetism to the role of Major Charity Adams, no-nonsense commander of the 6888th Battalion. Elsewhere, however, crucial scenes are sunk by am-dram-level manglings from some of the supporting cast.