As a fan of the fantastic, effervescent, brilliant play, both in reading it and seeing it live, written by Ntozake Shange, who won awards for her play, excuse me, choreopoem, back in the 1970s, I went in with high expectations for the film adaptation of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf., appropriately titled For Colored Girls for the big screen, and I was, unfortunately, disappointed.

The story revolves around several African-American women as they deal with everyday situations, including abortion, rape, abandonment, love, faith, and much more, and through these stories, one can respect what the African-American woman goes through, and for some of the film, the individual stories intertwine and the characters meet and react to their everyday lives.

Despite riveting performances from the entire cast, including Kimberly Elise, Thandie Newton, and Phylicia Rashad, and despite including one of my favorite, harrowing moments from the choreopoem, “A Night With Beau Willie Brown,” the film fails to makes its mark in both adaptation and direction. Admittedly, some of Tyler Perry’s work is creative, funny, genuine, and raw, but in this case, he seemed to overcompensate the script by directing a jumbled, convoluting story that is way too intricate for its own good, thus confusing the audience more so than the play.

While it has its defining moments, such as “A Night With Beau Willie Brown,” the stand out performances, and the “stuff” monologue, the film becomes extremely more convoluted when adding two or three additional characters not already in the choreopoem. The only explanation I can support for adding these characters is to make the entire choreopoem more fit to be a theatrical film; however, like I said, adding those characters makes the story even more convoluted than it should be.

On a more positive note, the film did not seem as long as its over-two-hour runtime. While the play itself lasts just over an hour, Perry added and hour of script and direction to the film, which definitely gave me more for money, but as I have mentioned with Tarantino films to my friends before, don’t be afraid to cut. I feel that if the film was under two hours and more true to the source material, it would have been an excellent film.