Movie Review: 'Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween'

What is there to be said about Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween? You already know it’s not any good. We all know that Tyler Perry doesn’t give a damn about the quality of his work. It’s completely critic-proof. I am epically wasting my time writing a review of this, or really any of Perry’s work. And yet, I am somehow here to write a review of Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween. It really makes me begin to question my profession. Not completely, lord knows I wouldn’t want to get a real job.

Here is where I will make a vain attempt to describe a plot, of which there is little. Brian (Perry, in one of his three roles) continues to struggle as a parent to his daughter, Tiffany (Diamond White). Yes, despite Brian’s parenting success being the only arc of the first film, he still sucks as a parent and has to learn or teach(?) a new lesson to his horror of a daughter who, frankly, seems like a lost cause. Given her decision making, based on these two movies, it’s a wonder she’s still alive, let alone ready to donate her virginity to a doofus frat-guy.

It's a testament to Perry’s opinion of women that they range from whores to idiots to shrews. Whereas early in his career Perry seemed to have a modicum of respect for his female characters, that’s long gone. I would call Perry a misogynist but I can’t be sure that the hateful way in which he portrays women in his two Halloween features is genuine disdain for women or his overall incompetence as a director and storyteller.

In case you think I am just lobbing P.C bombs, let’s profile Perry’s female characters in Boo 2! A Madea Halloween, shall we? First there is Tiffany, who is portrayed as a danger to herself and others after she is given a car by her mother despite having done little to warrant such a gift. She only gets the car because Perry portrays the mother as the kind of awful parent who buys her daughter’s affections with gifts and makes out with other men in front her ex-husband– in other words, she’s a castrating shrew.

Tiffany goes on to then forcefully tell a rowdy group of frat-boys that she is now 18 and, by extension, that she’s now legal to have sex with. This gets her invited to the frat party at a supposedly haunted lake where Tiffany is portrayed as eager to have sex with frat guy Jonathan (Yousef Erakat), a man portrayed as such a stereotypical moron that you wonder if he’s acting or if he has suffered a terrible head injury. Meanwhile Tiffany’s friend, Gabriella (Inanna Sarkis), is portrayed as a buzzkill simply for wanting her friend not to have sex with this doofus.

Then there is the always problematic Madea, played by Perry himself. Madea seemed to begin life as a scold who was out to correct bad behavior with some old fashioned tough love and a switch. Since then, however, Perry has decided it’s funnier for Madea to have been a horrific former criminal, sex worker, stripper, pimp and drug addict who finally got too old, too old for the street game. Madea has always been a reductive caricature but in the Boo movies Perry has stripped her of what little moral authority the character might have had in its initial creation.

Cassi Davis and Patrice Lovely, meanwhile, are working to set acting back to the stone age with their portrayals of Madea’s friends. Davis’s Aunt Bam was a one note joke about medical marijuana in the first Boo movie and here she is, something akin to the black actresses forced to act like fools in the racist comedy horror movies of the 1930’s and 40’s. As for Lovely, what she’s attempting to do with the character of Hattie is completely lost on me. From her dying cat yowl of a voice and reductive prancing caricature of an elderly black woman, Lovely is supposed to be funny but comes off as punishing audiences with her very presence.

I’m completely and utterly baffled by the success of these movies. Boo 2! A Madea Halloween is set to top the box office and, thanks to Perry’s no frills, low budget filmmaking, he’s set to make another tidy profit. In the screening I attended, I heard actual laughter and my heart sank. What could anyone have found funny about any of this preening, screaming falling down nonsense? Boo 2 is populated by horrendous characters, poorly portrayed by actors out of their depths, captured by a filmmaker who barely seems to be trying to make sure everything is in frame, let alone aesthetically pleasing.

It’s a complete mystery to me how Perry has gone so far on such limited talent. Add to that his ever-increasing ugly portrayals of women–arguably the audience that has done the most to support him (if audience research is to be believed)–and you should have a recipe for a flop. And yet here we are on the cusp of Boo! becoming a yearly sequel-producing machine.

Like I said, what is there to say? The only proper reaction is slack-jawed horror but I used up all of that reviewing the first Boo! movie.