Madea never gets old for the reason Perry never gets tired of playing her: She's his unleashed id.
How old is Tyler Perry's Spitfire matron Madea? Her age is not specified (I would say she is in her mid 70s), but whatever it is she is several years younger. He has a timid-dog irritability that won't quit. And Tyler Perry can't leave him. He had hinted that "A Medea Family Funeral", in 2019, could be the last Medea outing. But the pandemic changed his mind. I say that with or without it, Perry would have returned to Madea, because that's more than her biggest hit—that's her Unlimited ID, the character she's accustomed to playing because she personifies her many angels and demons. does.
Of course, she's also an eternal crowd-pleaser. The first Tyler Perry film, "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" (which included an appearance by Madea), was released 17 years ago today. At that time, he had already been doing Medea on stage for years. But Madiya as a character has now acquired folkloric status. I've seen and reviewed almost all of Perry's movies, and if you asked me if I'm a fan of Perry, I'd say "on and off," which doesn't mean I like some of his movies and others. dislike. I mean, in almost all of their comedy/soap-opera mashups, there are moments that I love and others that make me shake my head with disbelief. He's a Tyler Perry mix: the good, the bad, and the ugly, the honest and outrageous, the clever and the amateur, the diabolical and the banal, all in one "love yourself!" A big goodbye rolled around his neck. Message.
"A Maddie Homecoming," the first Perry film to be released on Netflix, is based on Perry's 2020 stage work "Media's Farewell Play," so I went in to expect it to be a relatively restrained affair. Actually, it's the fastest, funniest "Madiya" movie in quite some time. Remember when Eddie Murphy played half a dozen family members in "Natty Professor II: The Clumps"? Whenever Perry plays Medea with at least one of her relatives, she shares Murphy's sense of damned, ribald, let-it-rip brutality. But Perry has his own unique style of smart-mouthed oldies.
In "A Maddie's Homecoming", Madea, the pious and secretly anarchic church lady in her gray hair and gaudy floral dress, is still, in her old-school manner, a bandit, a potheaded matriarch with a shadowy past. . prides itself on staying out of the system. He has a house full of warrants, the result of ignoring things like fines and judges' decrees; He's got stories about what it was like to work at the pole: He has a little gun (and yes, it will take off); She thinks running away from Popo is keeping her young (and it does). Her brother, lusty spawning Uncle Joe (also played by Perry), and her equally lusty cousin Aunt Bam (the fabulous Cassie David-Patton) have always been flirting with each other, but they're actually a hustler's pod. I have two peas. As all of their relatives come together to celebrate the college graduation of Tim (Brandon Black), who happens to be Madea's great-grandson, when many of them gather to Krusty Joe, "I need a Got the question! Why are all these Negroes in this house at all - is this Amistad?"
One who is unstoppable, but smarter than he looks. As he learns that Tim and his "friend," Davy (Isha Blacker), are dorm roommates, he finds out what's going on with them. "A Maddie Homecoming" is here, a '70s inner-city comedy that turns into an earnest coming-of-age story with more than one or two mysteries.
There's a weirdly amusing, ironic whiplash when you watch the movie "Madiya." Senior citizens on screen chuckle at each other with the fast and furious burn-the-or-I-burn-you glee of sitcom characters on dirty-minded overdrive. But young people (that is, everyone under the age of 50) get so caught up in their melodramatic troubles that they seem to be satire. This time, Perry pulls a swift one on the audience. We think Tim telling everyone in his family that he's gay is going to cause an uproar, but most of them, like Joe, already figured it out. He has no problem loving Tim for who he is. Tim's problem is that his partner, Davy, is in love with someone else - and not just anyone else. Somebody... near home. It's a little surreal, a little icky, and a little crazy.
But it's a Tyler Perry movie, so you roll with it. You roll with it so you can watch Perry team up with Brendan O'Carroll, star of the BBC sitcom "Mrs. Brown's Boys," who plays Mrs. Brown here—she's Dewey's Irish great-aunt, and She's like a less funny Mrs. Doubtfire who says "fookin'," just often enough that you're glad she's around. All you get to do is watch as everyone digs into Madea's private stash of candies—chocolate with a marijuana center—which turns the film into a stoner comedy. You see it in the film's condemnation of the police and a 1955 flashback, where Madea re-enacts the story of how her best friend stole her man, who according to Madia was Rosa Parks. It seems that the whole reason he refused to get off that bus was to avoid the donkey.
OK, this is so silly it's just plain wrong. But that "Madiya" is part of the package: that you're going to sit back and relax in a movie that has no pretense beyond looking as if it were going along. Tyler Perry may be a crappy movie narrator (and, in his serialized TV work, a better and more interesting one), but in "A Maddie Homecoming" he does something that's harder than it looks: he plays these characters. Keeps popping, as if playing with his ego. Madea, Uncle Joe and Auntie Bam are a little Marx Brothers and a little gangsta. And Madiya, in her fiery way, has become eternal. Perry doesn't just play him, he channels him. This is why he can't (and shouldn't) stop.