Before seeing this film I'd never seen a movie or play in the Tyler Perry canon. For the last few years, I've just ignored the series, passing it off as a group of over hyped mediocre dramas and comedies. The only knowledge of the series I'd acquired through the years is that one of the recurring elements of the films is Tyler Perry in drag as a fat old cantankerous woman (The titular Madea).
If I had to pick one word to describe "Madea Goes To Jail" it would be schizophrenic. The movie swings wildly from a fairly well done comedy to a slow plodding drama. This is the result of 2 storylines that barely connect to one another. The comedic story naturally deals with Madea's run in with the law while the dramatic storyline deals with Joshua, a district attorney, trying to help his college friend turned prostitute, Candace, make a better life for herself.
The title of the film is unbelievably inaccurate. First the movie is far more concerned about Joshua's drama than Madea's latest misadventure. Second, Madea doesn't actually go to jail until the third act with roughly 25 minutes left in the film.
The Madea story is pretty damn funny, Madea steals every scene she appears in with abrasive one-liners and a mild sarcastic wit. The highlights being her anger management sessions with Dr. Phil and her encounter with a prissy white girl in a K-mart parking lot. The schizophrenic nature of the film shines when the more prominent district attorney/prostitute story takes over. The best example of this is when Joshua tearfully explains why he is trying so hard to help Candace. This is the big emotional moment of the film and right when it abouts to hit home...we cut to Madea doing something funny.
The dramatic saga of Joshua and Candace is just dull and predictable. When Joshua's fiancée Linda mildly over reacts to him helping Candace, we instantly realize that she will be the film's villain and that before the movie's over she and Joshua will break up when he finds out how evil and manipulative she is. This leads to the one thing that pisses me off so much about this part of the movie: Joshua and Candace get together in the end despite neither showing any real interest in one another. Joshua leaves Linda at the alter after finding out what she's been doing and immediately rushes to the prison Candace has been sent to (same one as Madea, providing the only real overlap of the 2 plots) and tells her he loves her. I don't understand American cinema's obsession with shoehorning a romance into every movie regardless of its genre, and this movie doesn't help. I would have respected the movie more if Joshua and Candace had just remained friends.
I've already talked about the movie more than I actually intended to. Bottom line, the movie would have been better if it had focused more on what they advertised the thing as: a comedy staring an old feisty black woman going to jail. This movie was ok and harmless enough to ensure that will be more Tyler Perry movies, but it doesn't make me want to see anything else with the Tyler Perry name.
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