Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family Review [Rating:4.5/10]
Movie Review by Time
Mabel Simmons — known as Madea to her extended family, and to millions of Tyler Perry devotees — is a dominatrix of tough love. When a 10-year-old disrespects her, she tells him, “I’m gonna beat your ass till your legs run right up your back.” To put the fear of God into a young man with too many problems and no answers, she thunders, “You’re gonna wish that sperm did a backstroke when it met the egg that made you.” Madea is one ballsy woman, perhaps because she is played by Perry in a chalk wig and a housedress with fat-lady padding. He dresses up in drag so he can dress down the world.
Perry is a multimedia dynamo: best-selling author, progenitor of two TV series and, most prominently, writer, actor, director, producer and financier of immensely popular stage plays and movies designed for an adoring audience of older blacks. The 10 films he’s made in the past six years — including Madea’s Family Reunion, Why Did I Get Married? and I Can Do Bad All by Myself — have earned more than $500 million at the domestic box office (and less than $2 million abroad; he’s strictly an American phenomenon).
Movie Review by boston.com
Just because ABC is pulling the plug on “All My Children’’ and “One Life to Live,’’ that doesn’t mean we can’t still get 20 laundromats worth of soap. Especially if no one’s pulling the plug on Tyler Perry. “Madea’s Big Happy Family’’ is more than just an industrial-strength soap opera. It’s the entire daytime-television industrial complex.
Movie Review by Chicago Reader
Another bizarre outing for Tyler Perry’s foul-mouthed, two-fisted, 70-something drag matriarch, who solves various family problems with homey advice, threats of violence, and motor-mouthed profanity. Madea’s sweet niece (Loretta Devine) assembles their clan for dinner so she can announce that she’s dying of cancer, but the family members won’t stop squabbling long enough for her to break the news. Like most of Perry’s movies, this one oscillates wildly and shamelessly between raunch and pathos, leaving plenty of room for the performers to work.
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