Tyler Perry reached a milestone this year: Two decades of “Madea” movies. The bigger-than-life female character Perry created for the stage has been entertaining audiences and confounding critics since the first “Madea” movie, “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” hit theaters in 2005.
As the title suggests, that picture leaned a little heavier into melodrama than broad comedy, despite the fact that Perry, as he would continue to do over the next two decades, played Madea as a kind of burlesque who wore outlandish dresses and substantial padding, and painted the character in broad strokes.
In “Madea’s Destination Wedding,” the 13th “Madea” movie, she continues to take no prisoners when affronted. It begins with our heroine confronted by some would-be stickup kids at a service station; she douses their car with gasoline and lights it on fire as they speed away.
The narrative gets more domesticated after this. Madea’s niece Tiffany (Diamond White), the daughter of her nephew Brian, is having a destination wedding in the Bahamas. Perry also plays Brian, in conventional guy clothing. Perry also plays Brian’s father, the white-haired, feckless Joe. In one scene, the three characters banter on the front stoop of a house. The sequence demonstrates Perry’s adroitness as a multicharacter performer; the dialogue is delivered with admirable timing and intonation. And his staging, shooting and editing show that he’s become an equally deft filmmaker.
That said, the movie’s comedic family members yield a group workshop style of comedy that sometimes bogs down the narrative. The movie arguably has the longest plane-boarding scene in the history of cinema, followed by the longest hotel check-in scene. But if Madea speaks your movie love language, it’s all about the journey, not the destination.
Madea’s Destination Wedding
Rated PG-13 for language and themes. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
The post ‘Madea’s Destination Wedding’ Review: Hellur, Bahamas appeared first on New York Times.
