Soap opera-like in delivery, yet emotionally sanitized, Tyler Perry’s Prime drama “Duplicity” is a languorous affair. It’s a strange-looking, odd-feeling film that gestures toward mystery and larger conspiracy, but it seldom pulls on these threads. Instead, it ends up an anodyne political drama that says little of note.

At the movie’s center are two Black women, successful lawyer Marley Wells (Kat Graham) and TV news anchor Fela Blackburn (Meagan Tandy), who become bound by the police slaying of the former’s brother and latter’s boyfriend, Rodney (Joshua Adeyeye), an unarmed man jogging in an affluent neighborhood. The circumstances around how the police ended up in Rodney’s location are suspicious — they involve a mysterious phone call no one seems interested in investigating — though the shooting itself is more clear-cut in the film’s visual language.

Despite this, much of “Duplicity” involves circular conversations about whether Rodney’s killing can be justified. The film isn’t necessarily trying to frame the event as complicated, but this undue focus means it spins its wheels in the process, en route to its mystery being unearthed not through Marley’s sleuthing, but because information tends to be dropped in people’s laps, from sources far off-screen. Meanwhile, the characters attempt to wax philosophical about people’s duplicitous natures, all but turning to the camera and speaking the movie’s title. However, little of this is conveyed through recognizable human behavior. People only act in ways that serve the mechanics of the plot, which aren’t all that interesting to begin with.

Marley’s boyfriend Tony (Tyler Lepley) is a P.I. and former police officer, making him a plot conduit between Marley, the white rookie who killed Rodney, named Caleb (Jimmi Stanton), and Caleb’s supervising officer Kevin (RonReaco Lee), who’s not only known to the other characters, but was present for the shooting. This web of interrelated characters remains in stasis, as an unremarkable fixture of the backdrop, rather than a point of intrigue. It only really comes into play when the movie drops all its cards at once near the end, revealing twist after twist at breakneck speed, all of it through stilted dialogue. The result is unintentional farce.

Along the way, few actors are given the opportunity to sink their teeth into the material. For a premise as incendiary as a police shooting, with all the ensuing news chatter about protests and riots (none of which are actually seen), the drama is mostly sanitized. Graham and Tandy are seldom part of scenes where their characters’ grief is the focus — Marley may as well be an outside investigator with no connection to Rodney. The only person with anything resembling nuance of complexity is Caleb, the white cop who agonizes over having pulled the trigger.

Tonally, the story ends up halfway between malformed melodrama about inequity and a mystery steeped in respectability politics, wherein the point is how easily political allegiances (or assumptions about cops who shoot unarmed Black men) can blind one to greater complexities. Unfortunately, the film itself contains no such nuance. Even its aesthetics contribute to its confusing meld of genres and approaches. Anytime more than one person or object fills the frame, Perry’s compositions fail to draw attention for emphasis anywhere in particular. The palette also highlights shades of blue in every scene. If there was some tongue-in-cheek, police-centric reason for this, the result falls short; the frame is usually filled with hazy digital artifacts and unnatural halos around facial details, even after optimizing one’s TV settings. It is, quite literally, hard to watch.

Visually and thematically, “Duplicity” is best described as distracting. Its lack of focus results in a movie that merely presents — thought doesn’t meaningfully comment upon — issues troubling Black America, often presented through the lens of news media. A character even quotes Sidney Lumet’s “Network” at one point, a seminal American media satire, though this is the only indication that the movie has (or thinks it has) anything to say on the subject.

That’s mostly how things unfold in “Duplicity”: Characters show up and extemporize at length about a subject’s optics, but all they truly end up doing is describing scenarios we’ve already seen. In the end, the movie’s insights are limited to observing versions of real-world problems whose solutions are as simple as taking a beat to reconsider one’s initial impulses and presumptions. It’s a shame Perry’s filmmaking seems immune to such advice.