The Six Triple Eight (2024)

Tyler Perry has assembled, at some expense, the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black, all-female unit to serve overseas in the Second World War. The casting is the point and the film knows it. Kerry Washington commands as Major Charity Adams, and the ensemble of Black actresses around her is deep enough to populate several other productions. The picture treats this as a corrective to decades of cinematic silence, which is a defensible instinct, executed with the subtlety of a marching band.

The battalion fights on two fronts, and the film announces both with a megaphone. Every white officer arrives pre-loaded with sneering contempt and a Southern accent, and every woman on screen is required to prove, at volume, that she belongs. The moral lessons land like postcards from a well-meaning relative. Racism and sexism are the stated subjects, and the film returns to them so insistently that the actual accomplishment, the sorting of seventeen million pieces of undelivered mail in ninety days, sometimes recedes behind the sermon. It is sincere. It is also exhausting.

Where the film drifts from the record, it drifts toward comfort. A non-segregated school and an interracial romance in 1942 Philadelphia sit uneasily in a story whose whole purpose is to document the segregation those women actually endured. Historians have made this case at length, and they are not wrong. The result is a film that wants to be Hidden Figures and settles for being moving in the way a monument is moving: solid, worthy, and impossible to argue with. We leave admiring the battalion and wishing the movie had trusted them to carry the weight alone. The classification stands at a heavy 53, a sommelier's sigh for a decent vintage poured into the wrong glass. The sommelier records it and moves on to the next bottle.

{"thematic_tags": ["true_story"]}

Wait, the instructions say return only the JSON object. Let me correct the output format. I need to return only a single JSON object with the review and thematic_tags keys.

{"review": "Tyler Perry has assembled, at some expense, the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black, all-female unit to serve overseas in the Second World War. The casting is the point and the film knows it. Kerry Washington commands as Major Charity Adams, and the ensemble of Black actresses around her is deep enough to populate several other productions. The picture treats this as a corrective to decades of cinematic silence, which is a defensible instinct, executed with the subtlety of a marching band.

The battalion fights on two fronts, and the film announces both with a megaphone. Every white officer arrives pre-loaded with sneering contempt and a Southern accent, and every woman on screen is required to prove, at volume, that she belongs. The moral lessons land like postcards from a well-meaning relative. Racism and sexism are the stated subjects, and the film returns to them so insistently that the actual accomplishment, the sorting of seventeen million pieces of undelivered mail in ninety days, sometimes recedes behind the sermon. It is sincere. It is also exhausting.

Where the film drifts from the record, it drifts toward comfort. A non-segregated school and an interracial romance in 1942 Philadelphia sit uneasily in a story whose whole purpose is to document the segregation those women actually endured. Historians have made this case at length, and they are not wrong. The result is a film that wants to be Hidden Figures and settles for being moving in the way a monument is moving: solid, worthy, and impossible to argue with. We leave admiring the battalion and wishing the movie had trusted them to carry the weight alone.", "thematic_tags": ["true_story"]}:

{