Madea series

  • Madea’s Witness Protection (2012)

    Madea’s Witness Protection (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2021) Perhaps slightly more overly comedic than other Tyler Perry films, Madea’s Witness Protection combines a stock comic premise with Perry’s outspoken character to produce something that doesn’t fly high, but scores a few chuckles along the way. Some of the credit goes to the casting, with Eugene Levy anchoring the plot as an incompetent CFO left holding the bag after some corporate embezzlement. Through criss-crossing plot coincidences that would be unacceptable anywhere but in a Perry comedy, he and his dysfunctional family soon find themselves relocated in Madea’s house, with the elderly woman free to set them straight. The third act eventually has the protagonists striking back against the (unseen) fraudsters, leading to an upbeat ending. This is all clearly playing into Tyler’s wheelhouse, as he plays three roles and gets to be both the serious anchor as much as the comic powerhouse, with Madea using some folksy wisdom to whip an upper-class white family into shape. I won’t get into the plotting coincidence that litter the entire script (all the way to hidden links being revealed between the characters), nor the fairly easy humour that peppers the script, especially during the fish-out-of-water third act designed to let Madea rampage through New York City. I started looking at Perry’s filmography out of curiosity but now, something like eight films in, I’m actually becoming something of a fan despite the sloppiness of the scripts and bare-bones directing — it’s a comfortable universe, Madea is a good character (albeit rarely as fully exploited as she could be) and Perry does deliver something of a very specific take. Madea’s Witness Protection does have the advantage of not taking very daring dramatic swings, making the comic result easier to accept.

  • Boo! A Madea Halloween (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) No one can make a case that Boo: A Madea Halloween is a particularly good movie. Even in writer-director-producer Tyler Perry’s filmography, it’s a bit clunky, far-fetched, obvious and trite. But I nonetheless found it fascinating—it manages to have a Halloween comedy for an adult audience without supernatural or overly violent elements in the end. It plays to a small-c-conservative crowd, but skirts the edges of having a comedy set-piece set in a church, and reinforces family values in its conclusion after going through a tough-love phase. Perry himself plays three roles, two of them the thesis/antithesis of what familial love means for the teenage protagonist of the film. Dismissing Perry’s films is easy, but they end up being fascinating in their own way. If Boo: A Madea Halloween feels slapdash and basic at times, it’s explained by an astonishing 6-day shooting schedule—that’s not a lot of time to finesse details, let along build some visual interest along the way or whittle down the film to its core. As Madea, Perry is not bad—and there are plenty of comedic curveballs to distract from some obvious messaging about fatherly love and protection. (It’s refreshing, in a way, to see the college-age party animals react rationally when they discover that the heroines are underage—the girls suddenly become as if radioactive to the fratboys, and that’s a clear sign that the film is not going to go there.)  It’s unfortunate that Perry’s writing can be lazy, or that the tone of the film goes everywhere without control. Of course, at this point in my exploration of Perry’s filmography, I’m essentially a convinced fan—not necessarily a member of his core audience, but someone who’s quite willing to play along.

  • Madea’s Tough Love (2015)

    Madea’s Tough Love (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) In my ongoing project to watch more of Tyler Perry’s filmography, I’ve been a bit too trigger-happy on the DVR recordings and that’s how I ended up with animated film Madea’s Tough Love on my to-watch list. To be clear — Madea’s Tough Love is and isn’t a Perry movie: He produced it, voices Madea and even plays her in the framing of live-action scenes, but someone else wrote and produced it. The intended audience of the film is a bit of a mess, as Madea ends up having to do community service and ends up taking over a community centre to save it from destruction. There are a lot of kid characters, but the tone (and Madea’s overall attitude as a disciplinarian) are more aimed at adults. Having the film being animated allows it to take flights of fancy in wilder sequences impossible to do well in live action, including a wild chase with hydraulic-powered cars. It’s all mildly amusing and perhaps revelatory about Madea’s character, but it’s still a blessing that the film clocks in at a slim 64 minutes: it doesn’t overstay its welcome even in its predictability. Still, I’m ready to get back to live-action Perry, even if it means enduring him in drag.