During the ending of Tyler Perry’s Duplicity, a disheartened Marley talks about how the story is never about one case, and merit should never be wiped away by a single duplicitous situation or person. In the film, she is a lawyer whose best friend and her husband are having a tough time getting along recently. She’s actually really close to Rodney, so she tells his wife, Fela, that she will help them get their spark back. Marley is with a man named Tony, who Fela introduced her to. They seem to be close, but Marley doesn’t seem to be comfortable with the topic of marriage. We find out much later that she’s been betrayed by her ex enough to leave her incapable of trusting anybody fully. Yet still she finds herself embroiled in this crazy drama that unfolds much later in Duplicity, but with that said, let’s dive straight into the movie and who really killed Rodney.
Spoiler Alert
Who Killed Rodney?
After having a chat over breakfast with Marley, Tony, and Fela, Rodney goes on his daily run. It looks like he runs some gyms and is essentially a fitness trainer, but he isn’t doing well, which is why Fela is annoyed, but Marley doesn’t know about any of this. On his run, Rodney has some really loud music playing on his headphones. He slows down in an area he doesn’t normally frequent and walks into a house where he hasn’t been seen before. The white woman who lives by that house gets an anonymous call from a supposed neighbor saying that there’s a Black man in her back alleyway and he might be breaking into the house next-door. Without questioning the situation, the woman calls the police immediately.
On the other hand, rookie cop Caleb gets told that he’s going to team up with Kevin, an officer who is generally in a different jurisdiction. Caleb worries that he might’ve done something wrong, but Kevin assures him that everything’s alright. All of this is important information because it becomes relevant later. So, when the woman calls the cops, Kevin and Caleb happen to be nearby and make their way to the location. Before they get there, Kevin tells Caleb that if he says gun, Caleb must shoot without hesitation.
Rodney walks out of the house, headphones still on, and Caleb tells him to freeze. Rodney puts his hand in his pocket to pull out his phone and turn off the music, but by then Kevin yells Gun! and Caleb shoots Rodney twice in the chest. Kevin claims it’s because he thought the phone looked like it was a gun. Caleb, on the other hand, tries his best to keep the guy alive. As you can imagine, even though they called 911, Rodney ends up dead, and Fela is left all alone with all his debt to pay. But she’s got Marley, the best lawyer in town, who will get her everything she needs to survive this dark time.
Was Rodney a Bad Man?
It turns out Rodney had been cheating on Fela. Fela is a journalist with a couple of very nice colleagues. These colleagues are the ones investigating the case, and they give Marley this information. I suppose he was also doing terribly at his job, so overall he was quite the mess before he ended up dead. This is, of course, no reason to justify murder. On the other hand, these guys also find information about Caleb having had a fight with a Black man while he was in the military and calling him racist slurs. So, despite Rodney’s bad reputation, which is eventually revealed to the public, Marley thinks she has a strong case. Plus, because of the political climate of the day, people started protesting because an innocent man was killed.
Who Really Killed Rodney?
About 4 months later, while Marley is investigating the case, she gets kidnapped. It was Caleb, his Black wife, and the woman Rodney was seeing who kidnapped her. Marley has been working relentlessly on the case, but Fela hasn’t spoken to her in 4 months and also moved homes and didn’t even tell her. Back to the kidnapping, Caleb reveals himself to Marley and tells her that she should be looking into Kevin. See, the woman Rodney was dating was previously with Kevin. When she broke up with him, Kevin started stalking her. So of course when she started seeing Rodney, he didn’t like it. Caleb begs Marley to listen to their side of the story because his life will be completely ruined if he’s wrongfully framed. Rodney’s (or Kevin’s) girlfriend tells Marley that there was a house Kevin often rented where she’d hidden a recording device. She gives Marley the address of the spot, but Marley doesn’t seem to have changed her mind about the situation at that moment.
On the other hand, Marley has distanced herself from Tony because he knew that Rodney had been cheating. He hid that information from Marley even though it was key to the case, which made her angry. So, he’s been sleeping on the couch ever since. But, somehow, when Marley shows up at Kevin’s previously rented home, Tony finds her there, and she finds it extra suspicious. He claims he was there to find out information to give her, because he is a PI who is an ex-cop. But this is not the case. Kevin arrives there in a luxury car, and he invites the duo into the house, which he has now bought. This is when Marley should’ve run the other way.
It was Kevin who came up with the whole plan to make it seem like Rodney died by accident so that he and his friends (we’ll get to them in a bit) could get the settlement Marley won for Rodney’s widow and live their best lives. Now you’ve guessed it; it was Tony who was working with Kevin. Tony and Kevin then sedate Marley and take her on a boat. I suppose they’re currently using all the money that Marley got for Tony when he was dismissed wrongfully from his cop job (ouch). But how do they plan to get the Rodney money?
What Happens To Fela?
When Marley starts to come around on the boat from which the two men plan on throwing her off, it is finally revealed that Fela is working with them too, and she’s with Kevin romantically. They all hated Rodney and wanted to use his death for a pay-off. A patroller finds the boat and tells them that they shouldn’t be there, but he also notices Marley and starts to ask too many questions. Kevin shoots him in the chest, and he falls into the lake. At the same time, they throw Marley off the boat, and she begins to sink because she’s got a big chain to anchor her around her waist. She somehow manages to free herself and climb back onto the boat as the trio notice the floating body of the patroller and try to figure out what to do with him. Finally, Marley uses a flare gun she finds on the boat to shoot Fela, Kevin, and finally Tony off the boat and makes it back to the real world.
In Duplicity’s ending, Marley’s trust issues are much worse than where we started off, but she’s doing an interview on the show that Fela once worked on. Marley says that some people try to make these cases about the left and the right, and such situations take away from what’s truly important: that police brutality is a problem, and Black men specifically do get killed without reason more often than not. I guess the moral of the story is to not trust everybody and pay attention to the people close to you. But also, never blindly believe one side of the story based on one bad apple, because that will lead to all the good ones being dismissed too.
