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Tyler Perry must think I’m Boo-Boo the Fool. All of us know that Perry made the statement that “A Madea Family Funeral” is Madea’s last film, but I’m not buying it. We all know the face of Madea she is a tall, slap-happy and at times blasphemous old lady, and who knows Perry has not ‘gently put to rest’ her character. And Mabel Simmons, would just never go away without a fight. Just as death has to fight against Mabel. What Tyler Perry fans know is one thing that he gives his fans a dose of drama, and honestly speaking, he does more for the fans that don’t. And every single Perry fan knows this. This is true even outside Perry Nation. Because Madea is just a spectator and not the focus of the occasion, she can also appear in other films, and guess what? She will. If you want to place a bet on when we will see Madea again, consider me your bookie.
As you submit your bets, note that Perry’s best movie since ‘I Can Do Bad All By Myself’ is Madea’s Last Hoorah. He definitely had to change the funeral home scene into a sad spectacle parody considering the fact that Black Baptist funerals are too lengthy. A Madea Family Funeral makes fun of how black people prepare for and attend homegoing services. In a black church hat that looks like it came straight out of the Wicked Witch of the West’s closet, Madea runs the funeral like the orchestra at the Oscars. Any speaker stepping up to the pulpit is blatantly told “Two minutes!” She instantly pulls violators from the stage before they can utter a word. Even with all this, the funeral still takes 9 hours.
And there are even jokes about the amount of time it takes for Black folks to plan funerals. Vianne (Jen Harper), for instance, seems particularly keen in regards to the speed with which she interacts with her husband, Anthony (Derek Morgan). The last two days of arrangements that Madea is given manages to enrage all her relatives even more than they already are. As is the case with most Tyler Perry films, this family is packed full of secrets and drama, which helps provide the tonal shift we’ve come to expect from him. It works better than normal because in this instance, and unlike most of his films, the broad humour is harsher and darker. The serious and humorous elements seem to share the stage more easily in this case. In addition to that, Perry’s script gives Vianne an incredibly powerful monologue, which Harper delivers effortlessly and with so much energy that it becomes the highlight of the show.
In “A Madea Family Funeral,” this wedding turned funeral tackles an unwritten premise of why people shouldn’t speak poorly of the dead. Allow me to explain more. It could be that sometimes, the person who has left this world is a complete and utter ass who is condemned to spend their afterlife surrounded by undiluted descriptions of their character. Unfortunately, no matter how convincing things can get, some level of respect has to be observed. Since Madea serves as primal id, she is incapable of restraining herself from taking shots at dignity. “All these women look suspiciously unknown to me. Raise your hands if you knew the deceased,” She asks. After everyone does, she says “If you knew the deceased in the Biblical sense, raise your hands” And quite unsurprisingly, the same amount of hands go up.
The deceased was a major league magnate whose Viagra consumption exceeds their years on this earth. Indeed, every last one of these people in this movie is your typical champion mangina. Anthony suffers a heart attack in the midst of a particularly violent S&M sexual intercourse with Vianne’s best friend which is something A.J. (Courtney Burrell) and Gia (Aeriél Miranda) happen to hear, and later see. Gia and A.J. were having fun in the other hotel room, saw each other and started banging. At this point, it dawns on us that Gia is A.J.’s brother Jessie’s (Rome Flynn) fiancée and A.J. is precisely that to a woman whom he does not care about for most of the picture. This creates the main tension that Perry goes back to as soon as he abandons the comedy.
A.J. is the kind of guy Madea uses her pistol against in these movies, but this time she saves all her venom for her usual cronies, Hattie (Patrice Lovely), Aunt Bam (Cassi Davis), and her brother Joe (Tyler Perry). They are also present at the hotel when the affair involving Anthony is found out, watching him S&M clad and fully erect. (Hodie’s response to this is surprisingly low-class disgusting.) Madea attempts to keep this from Vianne, but her entourage is too loose-lipped. Madea has to resort to hitting them full palm whenever they get too talkative, sometimes to the extremes of knocking Joe’s dentures out and slapping words that will earn her a PG-13 or R, out of Hattie. I should feel worse, but I laughed my backside off each time this woman hit somebody.
As if he was not doing enough on a screen already, Perry features in his own show as an individual named Heathrow. Heathrow is paralyzed, wheelchair-bound, and speaks with an artificial voice box due to throat cancer. He has also lost both of his legs. To top things off, he has a half jheri curl with all the activator and mess that comes with it. This is the most base character Perry has given us, and how you feel about this is subjective. For me, I found him rather unnecessary, but I did chuckle when Madea mentioned his vibrating voice could give her an orgasm. I know. Bad Odie. Still, if you were hoping for more courteous humour, you picked the wrong theatre.
“Completely extraneous” is how I can also describe some particular scenes of this movie with a focus on the one where Madea and her crew get pulled over by the police. At the start, the cop screaming over a car full of Black people looks promising, but it goes nowhere and feels like it lasts forever. From what I remember, that is always his problem. A Madea Family Funeral is too long, at 102 minutes and some seconds, it is not too good. I reckon if his movies were about 80 minutes, they would be better. It feels like, in every single one of his movies, time is the main predominant factor. Reasons that are so low in quality like these need to get done quicker.
Regardless, I admit to bursting out in laughter many times and Vianne’s grand “What’s good for the goose” speech at the end did quite capture my attention. A Madea Family Funeral, if it is true that it is the last Hallelu-YUHRR for Madea, then the exit isn’t so bad. You may not miss her, but it felt like she left when she wanted to, for better or worse.
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