Five months after showing how bad he could do all by himself in adapting Ntozake Shange, Tyler Perry returns to transferring his own stage work to the screen, donning once again the Lane Bryant floral prints that have made his millions.
Like its predecessors, Madea's Big Happy Family features a saintly matriarch (Loretta Devine), a vilified bourgie princess, emasculated husbands, trifling heifers, a lengthy church scene, last-minute revelations about childhood-sexual abuse, a maternity truth-bomb, and the title character's slaps and sass.
The melodramatic messages also remain the same: Get right with the Lord,
open up about those shameful family secrets so the healing can begin,
teach those kids to stop being so damn disrespectful. But the amount of
clowning and nonsense in Madea's Big Happy Family--excessive even by
Perry's standards--all but muffles the community-outreach function (which
also includes a brief mention of the dangers of diabetes) his films
have always served.
Too lazy (and, it seems, cynical) to give his audiences any more than he
thinks they want, Perry appears to have given up on making a coherent
movie altogether. No thank yer.
--Melissa Anderson
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