I Can Do Bad All By Myself

Tyler Perry's new movie is pretty good. His movies have always been a little heavy handed on the dialogue, like a play, and have Madea running through many of them acting silly, but this one is a departure from that. Madea has a small part in this movie and mostly just cracks a few jokes at the beginning and a couple of other places to lighten the mood.

The movie runs about a half an hour long, because most of the songs in the movie are played all the way through and the Madea stuff is kinda like it's tacked on to a complete movie. Taraji P. Henson plays April, a nightclub singer who lives alone and is partially supported by her nogood married boyfriend, played by Brian J. White. Taraji's performance pretty much made the movie for me. Her emotional downs are contrasted against Madea's jokes and uplifting Gospel music. Although I am saying that this movie is unlike many of the other Tyler Perry movies it does add back in one of the keystone elements of Gospel plays, the songs are part of the story. Tyler finds all kinds of ways to get songs into the movie to display emotions and express the theme. To accomplish this he has enlisted some of the best in the business at putting feeling in a song, Mary J Blige, Gladys Knight, and Marvin Winans.

Hope Olaide Wilson is very believable as Aprils “mad at the world” niece, but you can't tell her range, because she's pretty much a one trick pony in this movie. Adam Rodriguez played the love interest and I couldn't tell if I didn't like his character, because they made him too goody goody or his acting. The things I didn't like about the movie were that the love story just didn't really develop. It just started then it was full blown all of a sudden. It didn't really move the story forward and wasn't really needed except to contrast with how bad most of the other father figure types, shown and mentioned, seem to be really bad. Overall I liked it. Perry is getting better and better at making movies and he successfully injects some elements other movies don't use, but he still has room to grow.