? Tyler Perry (Madea’s Family Reunion) wrote and directed (but doesn’t star in) this, his third movie as a writer, second as a director, and first not to feature his outrageous Madea character. Instead, he strays closer to romantic comedy territory with a tale of a working-class single dad (Idris Elba) facing a custody battle. Grudgingly taking a job as a limo driver, he finds not Miss Daisy but Gabrielle Union, a snooty yet unmistakably attractive lawyer whose friends keep setting her up with lousy blind dates.
+ Notwithstanding that just about all of the characters are familiar types, everyone’s pretty likeable here, and the leads are obvious eye candy. Perry’s direction seems to have improved from Madea’s Family Reunion, which seemed too much like a comedy and a melodrama side by side. Here, the comedy is well integrated into the story.
- The one thing you could say about the Madea character, caricature though she may have been, is that she was a mixture of good and bad, but everyone in this movie is one or the other (although it’s true that the lawyer must shed her haughtiness). The mother in the custody battle, whose new boyfriend is a drug dealer, is almost absurdly unsympathetic. Watching both this and Family Reunion I sometimes got the feeling that I was watching a morality play about how black people ought to behave as much as a story about characters. (Other than a judge, there are no significant characters who aren’t black.) One thing they shouldn’t do, the movie implies, is date outside the race. Although perhaps the lawyer’s stated preference is only physical, in having her mention it twice the movie seemed to go beyond celebrating self-sufficiency to advocating self-segregation. Finally, can you guess the whole plot from the description? Pretty much.
= **3/4 Perry’s not exactly August Wilson, but he has storytelling gifts that will serve him well if he tries something with a bit more moral complexity.
IMDB link
reviewed 2/16/07
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