KAREN (2021)

Studio:      BET Films
Director:    Coke Daniels
Writer:      Coke Daniels
Producer:  Coke Daniels, Craig Chapman, Sevier Crespo, Mary Aloe, Gillian Hormel, Autumn Bailey-Ford, Taryn Manning, Cory Hardrict, Tirrell D. Whittley
Stars:     Taryn Manning, Cory Hardrict, Jasmine Burke, Roger Dorman, Brandon Sklenar, Gregory Alan Williams

Review Score:

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Summary:

A White woman’s passive-aggressive racism escalates into dangerous behavior after a Black couple moves in next door.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Imani and Malik Jeffries, a Black couple, move into Atlanta’s affluent suburban community of Harvey Hill, which is named after a Confederate general. Karen Drexler, the couple’s white neighbor, installs security cameras around her home and starts treating Malik and Imani with passive-aggressive racism. Karen discovers that Malik secretly smokes pot and also has a handgun.

While having lunch with her friend Beth, Karen gets into an altercation with two Black men she accuses of being too loud. Karen ultimately has the two men removed from the restaurant.

Karen catches her teenage son Kyle spying on Malik and Imani being intimate from his bedroom window. Karen admonishes her son, but continues watching for her own enjoyment.

After he briefly plays basketball with her son in the driveway, Karen asks Malik to put antifreeze into her car. While he pours the fluid, Karen suggestively strokes Malik’s arm, which causes a spill. When he goes inside Karen’s home to clean up, Malik discovers Karen’s surveillance suite that she uses to monitor Malik and Imani. Malik abruptly leaves to warn his wife after additionally finding Confederate memorabilia in the bathroom.

At an HOA meeting where she presides as president, Karen proposes citing Malik and Imani for various offenses. Other HOA members question Karen’s motives and vote to do nothing, which angers Karen.

Karen invites herself to a housewarming party at Malik and Imani’s. Another guest, Malik’s friend Justice, turns out to be one of the men Karen had removed from the restaurant. Imani forces Karen to leave after Karen gets into condescending arguments about race with the couple’s friends. This leads to a later argument between Malik and Imani about raising a family in a racist world.

Karen angrily tips over Malik and Imani’s garbage can. While cleaning up the trash, Imani meets Karen’s young daughter Sarah. Sarah tells Imani that she has a Black boyfriend in grade school, but doesn’t want her mom to know because she is racist. Karen comes outside and has another angry encounter with Imani.

Karen questions what three Black teenagers are doing in her neighborhood. Karen demands to see identification even though one of the teens insists he lives there. Claiming she is being harassed and feels threatened, Karen calls her police officer brother Mike Wind, who comes and arrests the three friends for trespassing. Imani captures the altercation with cellphone video that goes viral after it turns out one of the teens is the son of prominent civil rights attorney Charles Wright. Imani tearfully tells her husband she doesn’t want to live in the Harvey Hill community anymore.

The HOA relieves Karen of her presidency after Charles Wright files a lawsuit against the HOA for the situation Karen created. Karen’s brother Mike also becomes incensed upon learning he and the police are being sued too.

Karen follows Malik to a bar and calls her brother. Using Karen’s knowledge that Malik smokes pot, Mike pulls over Malik and plants drugs in his car. Malik ends up arrested following a physical altercation with Officer Wind. Officer Hill, Mike’s rookie partner, accuses Mike of being racist. Mike threatens to kill Hill while warning that he is protected by a secret brotherhood within the police force.

Karen and Imani have another confrontation. Motivated to stay where they are after all, Imani and Malik hire Charles Wright to represent them. Charles shows the couple a file that suggests Karen and her brother became unhinged racists after a Black vigilante killed Karen’s police officer husband Ken.

Having followed them to the attorney’s office, Karen warns her brother that Malik and Imani hired Charles Wright. Mike falsifies a search warrant that allows him to arrest Malik for possessing a handgun. Imani calls Charles in tears. Charles calls the precinct and discovers Malik was not formally booked.

Karen cuts the power to Imani’s home and breaks in with a handgun. Imani defends herself with a sword. Karen shoots at Imani several times, prompting a neighbor to call the police. Mike immediately rushes to Imani’s house.

Karen shoots Imani in her shoulder. Mike tells his sister he will cover for her, but Officer Hill interrupts by holding the siblings at gunpoint. Mike and Hill fire their weapons at each other. Hill is wounded, but Mike dies. Imani grabs one of the dropped weapons and kills Karen. Imani and Hill recover.

In the aftermath, Malik is released from custody. An attorney files a civil lawsuit on Malik and Imani’s behalf. Imani, now pregnant, takes Karen’s position within the HOA and successfully renames the community from Harvey Hill to John Lewis.

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Review:

Before watching “Karen,” I had it in my head that this would end up being a pretty glib review. I could practically picture a snicker sitting on my face throughout the entirety of writing.

It started with a quick peek at user reviews on IMDb, where “Karen” currently has just a 2.7 rating from 600+ votes. Comments, many of which were written before the film’s BET airing and don’t appear to come from folks likely to pay $4.99 to rent “woke propaganda” early on Amazon, ranged from hyperbolic declarations like “worst movie of all time” to predictable accusations of “leftist liberal agendas” determined to demonize white people.

Social media reactions weren’t any kinder. After the film’s teaser trailer dropped, CNN, Newsweek, and USA Today all posted articles culled from angry Twitter accounts calling “Karen” a copycat “Get Out” cash-in. They likened the “unbelievably cringe” movie to an SNL skit that didn’t understand the nuance of Jordan Peele’s subtext or context and instead took a half-assed approach to a regurgitated “racism is bad” theme.

At the time, it seemed to me that a crash course might be in order regarding the difference between trash and trashy. Played by Taryn Manning, no stranger to tabloid tawdriness considering she portrayed a sex-obsessed Faye Resnick in the abysmal “The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson” (review here), this titular Karen was clearly a caricature, what with her basic b*tch bob cut and necklace of pearls for clutching. In case her physical depiction was somehow too subtle, Karen also decorates her bathroom with a Confederate flag soap dispenser, speaks to a manager about noisy restaurant patrons, plays passive-aggressive when wagging her finger over broken HOA rules, and accurately emulates that video of the woman who similarly played make-believe victim when confronted by a Central Park bird-watcher. And to think all of this occurs before an abusive police officer pours additional threats into the two-minute trailer.

No one gives Lifetime legitimate grief over their MOWs made with boxed-wine soccer moms in mind. “Karen” might be taking on touchier topics, but it evidently drove down that same lane of basic cable melodrama intentionally engineered to be entertainingly tacky. Anyone who took “Karen” as an earnest attempt at crafting a thought-provoking thriller had merely been blinded by the knee-jerk response of an internet outrage alarm. Just because it’s trashy doesn’t mean it’s also trash, right?

It turns out “Karen” is the sensationalized soap opera on steroids I just described, which is the sort of silliness the trailer advertises whether it wants to or not. The problem though, is I’m not completely convinced that’s the movie that writer/director Coke Daniels and 20+ producers set out to make. And if they expected audiences to take “Karen” as serious social commentary, then they dug some hilariously daffy holes to ensure no reasonable viewer could ever assign “Karen” any credibility.

New neighbors Malik and Imani aren’t as outrageous as Karen. How could they be? They do get a cursorily cliché moment of movie endearment however. After moving next door to Karen in her affluent suburban community, the happy couple giggles, rocks back and forth in an embrace, and gawks at their new home like they’re seeing it for the first time.

In the first of a few bafflingly bizarre creative decisions, Malik and Imani aren’t exactly the perfect pairing they present on the outside. For one thing, Malik has a habit of sneaking off to the driveway to smoke pot. He also has a handgun his wife didn’t know he brought into their house, further suggesting Malik keeps secrets he thinks Imani doesn’t need to know about.

Maybe that’s why it’s easy for Imani to believe Malik might have a fling with Karen, even if it’s impossible for us to suspect the same thing. One of the movie’s barely-bloomed subplots involves Karen sexualizing Malik, and Imani finding out about the other woman’s fantasy. Karen puts the moves on Malik, in an unintentionally comical sequence where he has to pour antifreeze fluid into her car for whatever reason, although this scene exists more to motivate how Malik finds out about the surveillance suite hidden in Karen’s home.

The notion of Malik and Karen having an affair is an improbable scenario for too many reasons than there is space to get into. Its mere existence as background noise speaks to the movie’s bigger issue of creating problematic protagonists who fight with each other about as much as they fight with Karen. Conflict is of course essential in storytelling. But it shouldn’t exist between heroes who need a united front against a greater threat instead of playing distracting blame games about Malik’s casual drug use making him an easy target for the police.

“Karen” makes mistakes like this all over the place. Rather than being an ordinary entitled a-hole, Karen gets let off the hook a little thanks to a backstory bit explaining her racist rage as the byproduct of a Black vigilante murdering her police officer husband. Say what now? As bad or even worse is the literal “white savior” who arrives at the end to rescue Imani since she apparently can’t do it herself. I wonder if one of the 20+ producers who had a hand in development took a look at the script and said, “Well, at least one of the white men has to be a good guy and Karen can’t be entirely awful either.”

I don’t wonder too much because, unlike the topics it awkwardly attempts to tackle, “Karen” doesn’t have the substance to be worthy of deep dissection. “Karen” is the movie I thought it would be: a live-action comic book whose kitchen sink inclusion of phrases ranging from “comply” and “All Lives Matter” to “you people” and “go back to Africa” makes for over-the-top exploitation ripe for howling at your TV with eye-rolling hilarity. I’m awarding a “what does it even matter anyway?” 50/100 review score because I’m still not sure what to make of the movie. I don’t know if the people who made it would have any definitive answers either.

Review Score: 50

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