Early in Tyler
Perry's newest insta-smash, noble Angela Bassett gets laid off from her job and
begs her son's neglectful father for help, only to run into a wall of contempt.
She makes it out of the encounter with her dignity intact, only to have best
friend/comic relief Sofia Vergara—whose over-the-top burlesque of
Hispanic sass is downright Carlos Mencia-esque—hurl a brick at the
deadbeat dad, Krazy Kat style. It's Tyler Perry's aesthetic in a nutshell:
strong, suffering female protagonists, no-good men, clear-cut ethical
quandaries, schizophrenic tonal shifts handled as gracefully as bumper-car
collisions, and a complete absence of moral ambiguity. Perry continues to see
the world
in black and white, to critics' chagrin and his fans' delight.
Adapted from
one of Perry's plays, Browns casts
Bassett as a single mother struggling to raise her children right and keep her
teenage son away from drugs and gangs. After learning that the father she never
knew has died, Bassett heads down to Georgia for some Southern hospitality,
courtesy of her father's brash family and a handsome retired basketball player
(handsome retired basketball player Rick Fox) equally interested in her and her
son's burgeoning basketball career. Bassett has been hurt by men for so long
that it takes her the entire film to realize what audiences will figure out
immediately: Fox is one of Perry's thinly conceived angels, not one of his
sneering devils.
That aside, after
proving that he could still pack theaters without his signature character in
his last two films, Perry brings back Madea in the clumsiest, most arbitrary
fashion possible, shoehorning her into the last 15 minutes in a completely
extraneous bit of business. Bela Lugosi's infamous posthumous appearance in Plan
9 From Outer Space was seamlessly
integrated by comparison.
Browns is ultimately a victim of its creator's success: What
once felt novel now feels well-worn, following the success of Perry's films and
imitators like First Sunday. Perry
undoubtedly knows his audience better than his critics do, but as the woeful
box-office of Semi-Pro attests,
even actors with huge built-in fan bases can only expect audiences to shell out
money to see variations on the same half-assed film so many times before they
rebel and demand something new.