Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween Review – About as Much Fun as Getting a Colonoscopy from Edward Scissorhands
Starring Tyler Perry, Diamond White, Cassi Davis, Patrice Lovely, Inanna Sarkis, Yousef Erakat
Directed by Tyler Perry
Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween is about as much fun as getting a colonoscopy from Edward Scissorhands.
What truly differentiates this sequel from its surprise hit predecessor is that for all its faults, the original Boo! actually provided a few big laughs, told something vaguely resembling a story, and offered a ham-fisted, yet still genuine morality message at its core; but this time there’s no avoiding the overwhelming sense that this was all nothing more than a lazy, slapdash, last-minute rush job to get a sequel into theaters for Halloween.
Tyler Perry fans deserve better.
Madea fans deserve better.
Hell, Halloween deserves better.
What very little masquerades as a plot in part two is more or less a recycling of the first. Tyler Perry again plays Brian, a dorky dad who keeps treating his now 18-year-old daughter, Tiffany, as if she were still a little girl. Tiffany proves to be every bit as bratty and immature as he accuses her of being. Brian’s ex-wife enters the fray this time, proving to be too permissive of Tiffany’s behavior, and undercuts Brian’s role as a parent.
The frat boys holding the big Halloween party Tiffany and her friends sneak off to are jacked-up dude bros only interested in having a good time and getting laid. Aunt Madea, Bryan’s druggie ex-pimp of a dad Joe, pleasantly plump Aunt Bam, and horny little sparkplug Hattie sit around the living room for half the movie scolding everyone for their poor parenting skills while hurling insults at one another before getting in on the horror movie cliché slapstick in what amounts to a modern version of an old Bowery Boys flick. Even the Scooby-Doo ending that reveals the moral Bryan was trying to teach everyone is back, only this time none of it makes any sense whatsoever if you stop for even a second to contemplate any of it.
The harsh truth is that this is not really a movie, just endless shtick. Not even sure I should call it “shtick.” More like endless banter. Actually, more like endless bickering. Poorly ad libbed, I might add.
I remember once reading someone online who criticized Quentin Tarantino for needing five lines of dialogue to convey what could be summed up in one. Going by that notion, Tyler Perry needs five pages to convey a single thought. Verbal diarrhea is what I would call this. Everyone – and I do mean everyone – talks a mile a minute, and barely a second goes by when someone isn’t running on at the mouth, and they’re not actually saying anything for the most part. Add to it that nearly everyone’s delivery is gratingly dialed up to 11, and soon I found myself praying for those few moments of blessed silence.
The endless chatter became such white noise to me I began to notice other things that also spoke to the lack of professionalism that went into crafting this follow-up…
Tiffany talks to a friend while standing closely to a lamp. You can see the lamp wobble as the actors kept brushing up against it as they recite their lines. I’d ask how something like this got into the final film, but the bigger question is how such a scene got blocked on the set to begin with. How hastily assembled was this movie that the actual filmmaking borders on Ed Wood-ian at times.
Near the end the ex-wife is in the police station arguing with cops about the college Halloween party her daughter is at. Perry suddenly cuts to a camera angle revealing several of the partygoers locked up in a cell just a few feet away. Did the wife never notice these people for the 20 minutes of movie time she had been there complaining to the cops? Was everybody in the cell deaf, explaining why none of them spoke up until the most convenient moment?
Perhaps the most unforgivable sin is how little Tyler Perry gives his title character to do. Madea is practically a non-factor in her own movie, merely along for the ride, often taking a backseat to Perry’s less funny and, quite frankly, hatefully misogynistic character of Joe.
So bizarre that a guy like Tyler Perry, who has made his career writing, directing, and starring in movies and plays that at their core are designed to convey religious-themed morality lessons, would celebrate a character who spends the entire movie either insulting women, bragging about the days when he was a violent pimp who would beat his hos if they got out of line, or making unwanted sexual advances towards an underage girl.
Also bizarre is the inexplicable casting choice of MMA legend Tito Ortiz as a henpecked dad Brian spends a considerable amount of time discussing parenthood with. What was up with that?
The actual Halloween portion doesn’t factor in until well into the second half when the college kids have a fairly tame party at a lake where a series of murders occurred years earlier; the killers are said to be still on the prowl. Enter a chainsaw-wielding, gas mask-wearing maniac named Derrick that looks like someone who would jump out to scare you at a small town haunted hayride. His demonic daughters, pale and long-haired, mimicking both Regan from The Exorcist and Samara from The Ring, only cement how low rent the allegedly supernatural shenanigans are.
Both Boo! movies have left me with the impression that Tyler Perry has probably seen so few horror movies in his life that he doesn’t even know enough about the genre to successfully pull off gags that still would be reduced to b-roll in the lamest Scary Movie sequel. People scream as they get chased. That’s about the extent of it. Perry really has no clue what to do with the Halloween element of what is billed as a Halloween movie.
By the time the movie finally got to the lake party for the actual Halloween shenanigans, I had already mentally checked out. I’d had it with the pointlessness of everything preceding it. I just wanted to yell “shut up” at the insufferable Greek chorus of unfunny that was Madea, Joe, Bam, and Hattie. They never, ever stop talking. Ever!
I laughed out loud quite a few times at the original. When Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween was over, I could have counted the number of chuckles I got out of it on one hand.
Last year I ended my Boo! review with a cheeky list of future Madea movie titles. After suffering through this pointless and obvious cash-in Tyler Perry slapped together to make a quick buck, I think I have the perfect title for his next project:
Madea Sells Out!
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