I just watched a Tyler Perry movie- Good Deeds on Netflix. Mr. Perry has some new movie in theaters now with Kim Kardashian that someone told me was pretty good. Me, not being a big fan of Mr. Perry decided to watch this movie since it was free, sans Madea, and more recent, I figured it might be worth a shot. Let me see what Tyler is doing these days.
**WARNING- this includes spoilers..but if you don’t know how this ends then you don’t know Tyler Perry**
I’m an optimist so good things first! Tyler is doing better. He is. There are scenes in this movie where the writing is good, the chemistry is on point, the acting is well done, and everything is believable. The fact that this happens in a Tyler Perry production is really a step in the right direction. Go back and watch Diary of a Mad Black Woman and then see Good Deeds. GROWTH! The problem is…it’s still terrible. I feel like TP is a man who wants to make Madea movies and someone on his staff or in his conscience is saying…”do better”, but he doesn’t know how, so he throws in a couple of elements to make it more palatable but he’s still not getting the point.
Let’s get into some examples. The characters are very cookie cutter and admittedly, this is typical of movies in the box office so I’m not really mad about that, but his are not subtle. Not nary a one of them. Everyone is overly dramatic in the most basic way that it’s astonishing. The brother- Walter, has absolutley no redeeming qualities what.so.ever. He’s so much of a belligerent loathsome prick, it’s hard to image why his brother puts up with him when his own mother doesn’t. There’s no reason for him to be so incredibly “bad”. If the point is to make him unfit to take over the company, why not make him have no drive, a slacker, lazy, incompetent or like any of the 100s of people I’m sure Mr. Perry knows personally who couldn’t run a business. Does he need to be the scum of the earth? If this was a Madea play circa 2005, he’d have beaten or raped a woman before the rolling credits. It’s that SAME dude, but now he’s got all this pent up rage and no woman to take it out on. It’s a shame really.
Then there’s Thandie Newton’s character. She’s the down and out on her luck woman with a ‘tude and mouth (sort of ) to go with it. Ok, we’ve seen this chick in movies before. Instead of making her from the hood (cause that would be a stereotype) they made her the widow of a veteran. But now wait…I have issues with her whole story line. Where are her benefits? Why isn’t Tyler Perry helping this woman get her due diligence from Uncle Sam? Her husband died fighting for this country forcing her to quit nursing school to be a janitor to feed her daughter, who by the way is always hungry? THIS MAKES NO SENSE!!! It’s like they removed the stereotypical parts and inserted something else but kept the same story line. Now she’s an educated middle class victim…yet she’s still in the same situation as all those Shaniquas from the hood. Thandie, girl you are losing. Get it together.
The fiancé is introduced as a well-bred bratty chick who hates children so much that she can’t even stand to hear her good friend lament about her day since it includes mentions of those god awful offspring. Lovely young lady. It’s the same rich entitled lady in every TP production but just before she completely demeans Tyler or stabs him in the eye for donating to charity like we’d expect, she instead takes that über uppityness and character building and does…well, nothing. Time is spent building this entitled persona for no apparent reason. When they break up, it’s a good scene. They just talk and agree it’s not working and to move on. Nobody gets shot or anything. It’s like Tyler doesn’t believe that his audience can accept he’d break up with this woman unless she’s a villain. People can understand a couple breaking up because of opposing views on having children. That’s reasonable. Instead of reasonable, they inserted Cruella de’Vil who squirms at the mere mention of the existence of minors, is cold, and mumbles what her boo is about to say before he says it so that we understand JUST how predictable he is. Yes. That makes all the sense. Again, same chick, minus her climactic tragic downfall at the end. The scene following the break up is so silly. The newly broken up couple shows up holding hands at thier engagement party to break the news. C’mon Tyler. This scene was about Tyler growing chest hair with his mother and brother. Why not have HIM show up, alone, and have that conversation? Still dramatic but without being goofy.
Next up, Tyler Perry. The hero! He plays a wet blanket named Westley. We are supposed to believe that this dude is RUNNING a successful multimillion dollar business with the backbone of a jellyfish. He can’t stand up to his mom, his fiance, or his brother, but he keeps spouting lines to Thandie, the poor decision making janitor getting screwed by the US government, that nobody but her ever tells him like it T I IZZZZZ. WHO WESTLEY? WHO isn’t telling you like it is? This WHOLE movie is people telling you like it is and you not having the gonads to do anything about it. I don’t understand. As over the top as the villians (aka family members) in this movie are – the hero here is equally lacking character. How he ended up with Gabrielle Union as his fiance is beyond me. He gets one whiff of a sassy janitor who knows the price of milk and all of a sudden he’s wearing dickies and cript walking to “Two P A C”. I can’t. Really. I’m done. The movie was great. Tyler Perry is a satirical genius who is somewhere planning a movie about a struggling dark skinned multilingual double degreed cashier who is the salt of the earth while sipping Dom Perignon and I’m just a hater with a 9-5.
My point is the same as the movie’s point- If you are living life on #TeamStruggle, but you are rude to the right person, you can get ahead. Big Time. So I’m going to log off, find some guilt ridden wealthy man and shove him into traffic. Cause I’m about my paper. See ya’ll in Africa. Deuces.
minaSpeaks 