Boo! A Madea Halloween (2016)
Starring Tyler Perry, Cassi Davis, Patrice Lovely, Diamond White, Yousef Erakat, Bella Thorne
Written and directed by Tyler Perry
Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween, sadly, is not the Ernest Scared Stupid of Madea movies the previews have been promising it to be for months now. I admit laughing quite a bit at the antics of Madea and company, but I also spent a good deal of time totally stone-faced, even puzzled at moments as to what it was I was missing as I heard others sitting around me laughing. Madea humor isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; I don’t mind the occasional glass of tea.
For me, the biggest letdown of this 9th appearance of Tyler Perry’s motor-mouthed, tough-talking, Church Lady alter ego is that it doesn’t do nearly enough with the “Hollerween” – as Madea calls it – premise central to the film’s entire selling point. If you’ve seen the previews, you’ve already seen most of the Halloween-centric gags. So much of Boo! feels like a missed opportunity.
What could have, should have been a modern-day version of an old Bowery Boys Meets The Monsters-type comedy with a life lesson tacked on for good measure ends up being a sporadically funny romp that spends far too much time forcing its characters to quite literally sit or stand around running their mouths about how everyone else should behave rather than actually engaging in the one thing that seems to frequently elude Tyler Perry even after all these years of tremendous success – a coherent story.
Perry plays Bryan, a single dad dealing with his 17-year-old daughter, Tiffany (White), who is growing increasingly disrespectful to both him and his house rules. Specifically, he forbids her to go to a Halloween frat party with her preacher’s daughter BFF, Oday Walker (a name I assume has to be the film’s most subtle joke), and their two white teen model friends (Bella Thorne and singer Lexy Pantera, both of whom are given so little to do I’m not entirely sure why they were even included).
Having to work that night and not trusting his daughter, Bryan calls in Aunt Madea (Perry in drag) to babysit. Madea brings along her brother, Joe (Perry in old man make-up), Joe’s helium-voiced and seemingly suffering from some odd form of mental development wife, Hattie (Lovely), and Aunt Bam (Davis), who’s running joke is that she finally has a medical marijuana card and cannot wait to show it to the popo if they come knocking.
The movie then devolves into a raucous, yet seemingly endless scene in the living room in which the three Tyler Perrys and two female friends discuss, argue, debate, belittle, etc., the modern state of parenting and the need for parents today to stop letting children call the shots over their parents. All except Bryan agree on one thing: From “love taps” to throwing kids off the roof, the best solution is some very physical tough love. This one scene alone may have set an uncomfortable world record for the sheer number of child abuse jokes in a movie meant to have a moral message.
It’s kind of amazing how Tyler Perry plays three characters in Boo!; yet, his worst performance is the one where he’s not in make-up, essentially playing a version of himself.
Tiffany sneaks out to the party, leading Madea, Hattie, and Bam to crash the frat party, where Madea snarks about how girls dress like sluts and guys are all horndogs, Bam gets drunk and high, and Hattie twerks. Madea soon collides with the fraternity’s broski-in-chief (YouTuber Yousef Erakat, the answer to the question, “What do you get if you BrundleFly Vin Diesel and any male cast member from “Jersey Shore?”).
The single most improbable moment of the film occurs during the party when the frat boys find out Tiffany and Oday are only 17, causing them to panic and freak-out about how much trouble they’re going to get into if anyone finds out they were trying to score with minors. Yeah, right! This fraternity got Tyga to perform at their Halloween party – no way in hell you could ever convince me these guys would ever be overly concerned about a girl being underage.
Tiffany sneaks back home before getting caught by Madea, but the party gets shut down by the popo, prompting Tiffany and the frat boys to seek revenge on these meddling old people by convincing them Bryan’s house is haunted, dressing up as a scary clowns and zombies, and other assorted pranks designed to scare the bejeezus into Madea.
In the last 15 minutes, things take an even greater turn to the bizarre as the movie goes into “Scared Straight” meets “Afterschool Special” mode with the tables turned on Tiffany, her friends, and the frat bros designed to teach them all a lesson in respecting your elders and obeying the rules. I say “bizarre” because by this point we’ve already spent 90 minutes watching these elders insult one another at every turn, commit multiple acts of physical violence, joke about physically assaulting small children, literally stealing candy from kids, smoking pot, flashing their breasts, spewing more vulgarities than I think I have ever heard in a PG-13 movie, and make a plethora of crude piss, poo, pot, sex, and masturbation jokes. The teens at the end are getting punished for doing stuff you’d expect from teens still lacking in maturity; what’s the old folks’ excuse for behaving like heathens and hooligans? I couldn’t help but sit there wondering if I was the only person finding a good deal of what was being preached on the screen a tad hypocritical.
The film’s funniest bit comes early on when Madea and Aunt Bam are handing out candy; Bam uses it as a way to sneakily steal some candy back from the kids while Madea comments on the kid’s costumes. That scene culminates with a chubby African-American kid in a cow costume Madea compares to “chocolate milk in a carton” before the kid and his mom gets wind of Aunt Bam’s candy-swindling scheme, prompting more funny barbs from Madea directed at all three. It’s also one of the few scenes that properly plays into the film’s title. You know, A Madea Halloween.
Like that early living room filibuster, the majority of Boo! is comprised of a series of long-winded, sometimes repetitive, roundtable diatribes edited together in a surprisingly clunky manner, primarily set within Bryan’s home, where everyone blasts non-stop jokes and dialogue about everything ranging from disciplining children to why, as Madea puts it, “Black people are scared of every damn thing.”
With lines machine-gunning out of everyone’s mouths, there are bound to be a fair share of laughs and just as many duds. A little Madea goes a long way, as does Perry’s crotchety old Joe, Lovely’s often juvenile Hattie, and Davis’ roly-poly Aunt Bam. But with so much for them to say but really very little for them to actually do in the context of a story – what constitutes a plot is really just a series of loosely cobbled together sequences – they frequently flounder about aimlessly trying to squeeze laughs out of nothing. By the third time we’ve watched some version of Tyler Perry wallop a person in a scary clown costume, the pratfall ceases to be funny.
Perhaps the funniest joke of all is knowing Boo! A Madea Halloween only exists because the title was a joke in Chris Rock’s 2014 comedy Top Five and some Lionsgate executive convinced Tyler Perry to actually make it a reality. Is that all it takes to get a Madea movie made? With that in mind, with the possibility that some Lionsgate producer is reading this right now, I would like to take a moment to toss out a few of my own ideas for future Madea moves I’d like to see. Do with them what you will.
- Madea vs. Predator
- Arrgh! A Madea Talk Like a Pirate Day
- Madeageddon
- House of a 1000 Madeas
- A Christmare on Madea Street
- Attack of the 50-Foot Madea
- Shin Madea
- Madea of the Dead
- Mac and Madea
- Mars Needs Madea
- The Good, The Bad, and The Madea
- Mad-Ea: Holy Road
- Tyler from the Crypt: Madea Knight
- The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down Madea
- Can Tyler Perry Ever Forget Madea and Find True Happiness?
- Madeegah (Madea in caveman times, duh!)
- Santa Claus Conquers Madea
- Madea, the Hands of Fate
- Madeanado
- Faster, Madea! Kill! Kill!
- Rob Zombie’s Boo! A Madea Halloween
- Madea Goes to Hell: The Final Perry
-
Film
Categorized:Reviews
