Mean, misogynistic movie posing as a romance with flat uninspired acting.
I wanted to escape Deliver Us From Eva after watching about ten minutes of the movie. This depressing movie loosely based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the shrew grates on the nerves and makes the stomach queasy. I'm going to have to start bringing a barf bag to these black romantic comedies. The abuse that passes as love in black romantic comedies makes me sick to my stomach.
The story of Eva revolves around the men who date and are married to the Dandridge sisters, a quartet of girls led by the hostile, man hating, man devouring Matriarchal sister Eva (Gabrielle Union). The men who are dating and married to the other Dandridge sisters can't do anything with their women because the sheep won't do anything without their older sister's approval. In a mean and sinister plan to get control over their households, and the sister's trust fund, the men recruit Ray, a player (LL Cool J) and pay him to date and dump Eva. After several predictable plot twists, Ray falls in love with Eva, and she's forced to choose between him and a big promotion in Chicago. The guys who hired him aren't happy because Eva is supervising the trust fund and the sisters plan on giving it all to her. To get a cut of the money and cut Eva out of their lives, they chain up Ray somewhere and fake his death. Ray busts out of the chains and heads over to the church to reveal the truth to Eva. Eva gets angry and leaves for Chicago. Ray gives up everything he works for and heads to Chicago to convince her to take him back. We get our happy ending and the credits roll. It doesn't matter that Eva or any of the characters haven't grown or changed from their experiences; they all still have the same bad character traits at the end of the movie that they had at the beginning.
I wound up sick to my stomach from the mean spirited misogynistic picture presented onscreen as black love. Like The Brothers and The Best Man, Deliver Us From Eva is a shallow movie with cynical message about black romance. Eva presents a even more bitter picture of Black on Black Love than the latter two films, showing it as a war between the sexes where black men and black women don't see each other as human beings deserving love or being capable of it. The dark skinned Eva is shown as evil to the audience because she has an opinion and asserts herself. In this movie Eva's assertion of self is a negative character trait and any black woman who acts in such a fashion is a nasty, hostile person who men can't love. The males in this movie have to humiliate and degrade her before one of them sees her as lovable. But Eva's lighter skinned sisters are as perfect mates. The other three Dandridge Sisters are docile and submissive creatures with no personalities, no opinions of their own and no sense of direction without the guidance of a master. They're never shown as trying to have an opinion of their own or disagreeing with Eva. And the men are never shown as remorseful for their unethical inhuman behavior towards Eva or making an effort to change the way to they treat the black women in their lives. If this is the current state of romance in the black community it's a sad state of affairs. I'd like to think African-Americans could treat each other better.
Director Gary Hardwick and his two screenwriters do a poor job putting this film together, wasting time with frames that don't move the story along. The three-minute opening music video sequence where the credits roll is a waste of time that could have been cut. More time needed to been spent developing the characters into real people. Because the three writers barely skim the surface, the film the characters act like stereotypes and we barely get to know anyone. There were so many loose ends that needed tying up on this movie. I wanted to see the other Dandridge sisters develop personalities and opinions instead of being a bunch of zombies. They should have been trying to break away from Eva as much as the men wanted her gone. The men should have learned that the women in their lives were human beings with their own opinions. However, the cinematography on this film was excellent, and the production values top notch.
The one-dimensional acting combined with the one-dimensional script makes Eva come off like a made for TV movie instead of a feature film. No one makes the extra effort to needed give their characters the three dimensions needed in a feature film performance. Gabrielle Union takes it way over the top playing Eva. Her facial expressions border on cartoonish. Duane Martin does his frustrated "All of Us" character while LL Cool J is his smooth "Marion Hill" character from in the House. Essence Atkins is DeeDee from Half and Half. Meegan Goode is flat.

Avoid this misogynistic cruel movie posing as a romance. For a real love story, pick up Tyler Perry's Diary of a Mad Black Woman or Darryl Roberts' How U Like me Now. Directors Darren Grant and Darryl Roberts portray black love as something beautiful with balanced healthy pictures of black men and black women.

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