"Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns" starts off well enough with Angela Bassett playing a strong-willed single mother struggling to raise her three children amidst poverty and unemployment on the South Side of Chicago. But the movie quickly goes off the rails when Brenda receives a letter from a distant relative in Georgia informing her that her father - who was never a part of her life to begin with - has just died. With nothing left to lose, Brenda packs up the family and heads on down to the funeral to pay her respects to a man she's never met. While there she is introduced to the "crazy" Brown clan, a collection of broad comic stereotypes that even vaudeville would have rejected as too over-the-top. As to the film itself, any hint of authenticity is instantly crushed under the weight of lowbrow buffoonery, heavy-handed plot mechanics and a fairy tale view of the real world.
Although he clearly means well, as a dramatist, Perry has never seen a shade of gray he couldn't reduce to simplistic black-and-white or a plot point he couldn't milk for all its melodramatic worth. All the men in the film, for instance, are either clowns, scumbags or knights-in-shining-armor, nothing in between. The gun shy Brenda - who has been hurt by so many men in the past that she finds it next to impossible to trust one ever again - has a certain depth to her character, but virtually everyone else becomes essentially a walking mouthpiece for what's right and wrong in the African-American community. And that simply doesn't make for very compelling drama.
Of the actors, Bassett is nicely restrained and understated as always, and Lance Gross exhibits some genuine talent as Brenda's principled teenage son, but David Mann, Jenifer Lewis, Sofia Vergara, and even Perry himself, in a pointless cameo appearance as both Medea and Uncle Joe, are allowed to spin so out of control in their various shticks that they turn whole sections of the movie into little more than a circus freak show.
Noble intentions notwithstanding, "Meet the Browns" is a true "drag" of a romantic comedy - in the most negative sense of that term.
Although he clearly means well, as a dramatist, Perry has never seen a shade of gray he couldn't reduce to simplistic black-and-white or a plot point he couldn't milk for all its melodramatic worth. All the men in the film, for instance, are either clowns, scumbags or knights-in-shining-armor, nothing in between. The gun shy Brenda - who has been hurt by so many men in the past that she finds it next to impossible to trust one ever again - has a certain depth to her character, but virtually everyone else becomes essentially a walking mouthpiece for what's right and wrong in the African-American community. And that simply doesn't make for very compelling drama.
Of the actors, Bassett is nicely restrained and understated as always, and Lance Gross exhibits some genuine talent as Brenda's principled teenage son, but David Mann, Jenifer Lewis, Sofia Vergara, and even Perry himself, in a pointless cameo appearance as both Medea and Uncle Joe, are allowed to spin so out of control in their various shticks that they turn whole sections of the movie into little more than a circus freak show.
Noble intentions notwithstanding, "Meet the Browns" is a true "drag" of a romantic comedy - in the most negative sense of that term.