I have never seen a Tyler Perry movie before. If Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween is any indication I probably won’t be seeing another one for a good long while. In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you the screening I saw had projection issues.
Excusing the projection issues Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween is a startlingly ugly film. There’s a laziness and nonsensical quality to the most basic screen compositions. The whole film has a slip shod quality that makes it feel as if Perry literally slapped it all together the night before. The movie feels more like a rushed student project than an actual film.
One particular moment bothered me because of convoluted blocking that could have easily been solved with simple editing. Joe (Tyler Perry) is in the car, in the backseat. Madea (Perry) is outside with Hattie (Patrice Lovely) and Bam (Cassi Davis). She calls for Joe to get out of the car. Madea, Hattie, and Bam are framed in the right corner of the screen. We see Joe exit the vehicle, his face hidden. Joe then walks around the car in the opposite direction avoiding the trio. He then gets into the driver seat of the car and lays his head down on the steering wheel. He remains there for the rest of the scene.
On the left corner is another character. A little girl in a white dress, with damp strongly black hair. She’s a caricature of the girl from the Ringu series. But she’s just sitting there doing nothing. All the action is coming from Joe, so our eyes follow him. But why? Perry is just wasting our time, and his, by needlessly showing us how Joe moved from the back seat to the driver seat.
Of all the genres comedy is the one that both relies the least on a visual style and the most on visual style. Perry doesn’t need to reinvent cinema. He just needs to put the camera down and let Madea do the work.
As the title suggests, this is a sequel. From what I can gather the original was quite funny. I wish I had seen that one and not this dreadfully lazy inconsistent baffling mess of a film. Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween is more padding than story. It would be one thing if the padding was at all funny but it isn’t. There is almost no joy anywhere in this horrible misfire of a movie.
The story, I’m guessing, is roughly the same as the first. Brian’s (Perry) daughter Tiffany (Diamond White) sneaks out on her birthday the night before Halloween with her friends Gabriella (Inanna Sarkis) and Leah (Lexy Panterra). Once again the trio goes to a frat party, only this time the party is held at Lake Derrick, a riff on Crystal Lake from the Friday the 13th franchise. Madea overhears Tiffany plotting with her friends. She enlists the help of Hattie, Bam, and Joe to go out to Lake Derrick to rescue Tiffany and her friends.
Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween is as dreadful and disgusting as any horror movie. At one point Madea hits a small girl; the Ringu caricature. Madea and her friends debate what it was she hit. Madea suggests it was a deer. One of her friends says she saw a white dress. “Well maybe the deer was transitioning.”
There’s a deep vein of misogynistic patriarchal nonsense running deep through Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween. The young women in this film are forced into the most form fitting and curve displaying outfits while Perry and the movie loudly remind us they are eighteen. The frat boys ogle Tiffany’s chest, even as she is dressed as a schoolgirl because she has just left school.
At one point Leah is hiding in Madea’s Cadillac, alone with Joe. Joe, in the driver seat begins to ramble a string of obscene come ons while she squirms in the back seat clearly uncomfortable. Joe stops and asks if Leah is eighteen. Leah, who we know, is a year older than Tiffany, lies and says no. It’s a moment that made me laugh but it was an uneasy laugh.
Perry recognizes that Joe is repugnant, recognizes that Leah is smart enough to have to deal with men like Joe and can handle herself, but somehow doesn’t recognize he puts the onus on Leah for rebuking and not on Joe for being a dirty old man. Yes, Joe being a dirty old man is the joke, but it’s the type of joke that enforces and shrugs it’s shoulders as if to say “Well if she’s going to look like that and dress like that what do you expect?”
Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween so misses the point that in a scene where Gabriella is being groped by a frat boy and offered beer she cries out “I don’t drink. I’m a Christian.” A woman is being grabbed and touched against her will and Perry seems only concerned with telling us she won’t drink and that she is a Christian. Little is said of the unwanted touching.
There are moments within the film where Madea riffs and Perry’s voice is dubbed over to edit out the cursing. Places where Perry clearly says ‘damn’ are dubbed to ‘darn’. This is a cheap and cynical ploy to get the rating to PG-13 but it’s even more bizarre when there is a string of ‘darn’s’ immediately after Joe has just said ‘mother f*****’. Combine all of this with the vitriol Perry seems to aim at Madea by Joe’s constant mis-gendering of her and you have one of the more uncomfortable comedies I’ve had to sit through this year.
There’s a war going on in the very center of the film. The war of what it wants to be. Does it want to be a Tyler Perry moralistic sermon drenched in the sort of patriarchal patronizing he’s famous for? Or does it it want to be an absurd silly comedy that just allows it’s characters to live and breathe, foibles and all?
I’ll admit to laughing here or there but that’s because despite all the flaws, Tyler Perry is not untalented. Perry has charisma and Madea is a genuine comedic invention grounded in both reality and absurdity. Diamond White has presence and charisma, but her body is given more to do than her character. The movie has no teeth or spine.
Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween is a woeful excuse of a comedy. There’s a meanness and lack of focus that makes for a deeply boring and unsettling experience. Rarely have I complained about projection issues, had them fixed, and then spent the rest of the movie contemplating if I did the right thing.
