A Madea Family Funeral (2019) - Movie Review

Always good to start checking out a trend right when it’s supposed to be ending, right? Yeah, I haven’t really discussed Tyler Perry’s work as a filmmaker on this blog before; hell, I’ve only seen one film he’s directed other than this one with Acrimony, which was basically Gone Girl except every single wrong decision was made during production. As such, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with the character that basically made Tyler Perry famous, save for a few stray clips here and there from videos made by other critics.

However, since this is apparently the guy who’s been dominating a sizeable amount of black cinema in the United State for the last decade and a half, and a lot of my reviews this month have been looking back at what’s made this decade’s cinema what it is, I figure this would at least give me some material to work with. And to its credit, it certainly did… along with the feeling that I was better off just leaving these things alone.

Let’s start with Tyler Perry’s efforts on-screen, as he’s cast as four separate characters including Madea. And they’re all pretty dreadful, each in their own unique way. Madea herself amounts to fat suit comedy with heavy embellishments in the vocal delivery, which largely results in saying her lines in a deeper voice seemingly at random. It’s quite grating from the first syllable, and it never manages to get any better from then on.

Then there’s her brother Joe, which feels like a role Eddie Murphy would have been offered back in the day, only to turn it down because it demeaned him too much. Then there’s Brian, the role with the least make-up, who plays like a thin parody of mainstream liberalism. And then there’s Uncle Heathrow, where Tyler basically uses an external voice box to show his character, a joke that’s so funny that it makes me wish Uncle Jimbo would mistake everyone for wild animals so this movie would end.

And now for his efforts behind the scenes, the point where I feel like using the word ‘effort’ is putting in more of it than he actually did with this. I got a pretty good taste of how he is with serious subject matter when watching Acrimony, and yet this feels like it’s closer to what Tyler’s cinematic style is really like. Half of it is essentially a soap opera, a genre that Tyler has made a lot of bank on in the past, and it isn’t a particularly good one. From the stilted acting to the lazy-as-fuck public domain background score (Christopher Lennertz really phoned it in from the sounds of it) to the quite overwrought writing, it’s like the film is trying to sell the titular funeral as the least tragic thing that’s happening to these people.

I’d be fine with that as a possible bit of self-parody, but the comedy isn’t nearly that sharp. If half of this is a soap opera, the other half is Tyler Perry bickering with different versions of himself, on and on and freaking on, for however long he feels like letting the camera run per scene. And even the definitely-scripted parts are terrible, like an early scene where a police car pulls the Madea family vehicle over. It’s so drawn-out, so desperate, so astoundingly tone-deaf, that it ends up setting a useful primer for what’s going to follow.

The centrepiece of the film, the funeral, is also drawn-out and desperate, except with that, the only joke is the fact that it’s taking a long time to finish. That must make this entire movie one of the greatest practical jokes ever told.

I’m not going to make any sweeping statements about the Madea series at large; I genuinely don’t know how representative this is of the other films, or where it would land if they were all in a ranked list. So I can only judge this on its own, and as a singular film, this was painful to sit through. I actually think I gave Sextuplets too hard a time by comparison; at least that film had a cohesive idea about what it wanted to be. With this, it ends up stuck between bad soap opera and bad comedy, and I feel like I need to rest my ears from all the random yelling.