Movie Review: Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself

It was a Sunday afternoon and having missed church earlier that day, I was able to get my Sunday morning sermon while watching this movie, thanks to Tyler Perry. His new movie, "I Can Do Bad All by Myself," does nothing to show Tyler Perry's growth as a film storyteller, but it is an improvement from his last film, which was probably his worst.

Academy Award nominee Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons) plays April, a self-absorbed, alcoholic night club singer who is in an unproductive relationship with a married, one-dimensionally evil egomaniac name Randy (Brian White). Prone to sleeping late, April's life gets a wake-up call when Madea, the hotheaded, gun toting old grandma (made popular and played by Mr. Perry), shows up at her front door with April's niece and nephews. The three juvenile delinquents were caught breaking into Madea's home. The kids' mother, April's sister, died from drug abuse and their guardian, April's mother, has been missing for four days. April's house becomes a temporary shelter for the kids as she urgently wants to find her mother, constantly reminding us of her refusal to have children.

The children are 16-year old Jennifer (Hope Olaide Wilson), the sassy but emotionally scarred protective big sister of Manny (Kwesi Boakye), the diabetes and asthma sufferer, and Byron (Frederick Siglar), the mute who could be mentally challenged. April and Jennifer fall into petty squabbles prompted by immaturity and silly pride.

At the same time, Sandino (played by a wooden Adam Rodriguez) is the poor Colombian immigrant looking for work as a handyman and is referred to April by the pastor of her former church. He helps with April's rundown house and the children.

With such characters, you find yourself watching the typical Tyler Perry formula. The misguided heroine-check! Her outrageously evil one dimensional lover/husband-check! The blue collar, flawless dream man for any woman that will sweep heroine off her feet-check! Actually, I see a slight shift in this film's characterization as this story goes from awful 'dark skinned' black man versus flawless saintly 'light skinned' black man to awful 'black man' vs. flawless saintly, even lighter 'Hispanic man'. I wonder what's next. Then, of course, the heroine struggles with them both-the strength to leave evil one dimensional lover/husband, pushing away the perfect flawless dream man for no reason, none whatsoever.

I appreciated the themes of family and taking ownership of your own life in this film. If only Tyler Perry had the talent to execute such ideas in a cinematic way.

The writing was lazy. It was just one poor choice after another by the Atlanta based playwright turned film director. The characters were completely underdeveloped, which stops with some back story as far as Tyler Perry is concerned. If only it was that simple. He never gives his characters complexity, ever. What you see is what you get. The characters are restricted to the struggles of every day people, antagonized by only personal conflicts most people endure. Soap Operas are the only form of storytelling popular for only having conflict at the personal level. This is a no-no for feature films. Tyler is obviously in the dark about things like inner and extra-personal conflicts, and how to dramatize them in a powerful antagonist. There's nothing special here, and to make matters worse, the characters are either unlikable or way too sympathetic.

In a Tyler Perry story, the sympathetic characters barge their way into audience members' hearts with the use of some manipulation and superficiality, like in Sandino's case, being gorgeous to the mostly female audience. Perry never does the work at getting an audience to connect with the characters using character recognition to create understanding and empathy, four types of contrast to keep the audience fascinated by the characters, and some mysterious complexity to keep the audience guessing. Being amongst his audience, one can hear his biggest supporters proudly predicting what will happen next in this film. Unbeknownst to them, they are being robbed of a truly original and worthwhile storytelling experience.

The only characters you care about are the children. Tyler Perry does a great job at victimizing them just enough to win our empathy, which was complimented by the best performance in the film, given by the young up and coming Hope Olaide Wilson.

It takes too much time to engage with the rude, self-centered, somewhat hostile heroine April, and it says a lot about anyone who can connect with Madea, the foul mouthed, violent, ignorant old woman who shows no love to anyone.

The contrived writing also left me with questions, like why would April's father leave the rundown house to April instead of her mother? Were April's parents separated? This should have been made clear instead of feeling like a setup for things to come.

The directing was amateurish, with everything obviously staged. It was laughable how every time known singers turned actresses, like Mary J. Blige and Gladys Knight, would finish preaching to April in idle conversation, at separate times, then go on stage to further sing their message to her. Even the pastor followed suit of this in his church, doing the exact same thing. It was weird and each time, the singing would only slow down the already slowly moving story. The numbers weren't badly sung with Gladys Knight and Mary J. Blige both bringing down the house respectively, but it all felt so inappropriate for any genre other than a musical.

I also found myself struck by things like bad cinematography, showing hard shadows in natural lighting, and the low quality sets of Tyler Perry's new studio. He needs to use his sets for his television show and continue to shoot on location in Atlanta for his feature films. I even saw in one shot, the Sandino going from the fridge to the living room and the camera panning with him, ending in an over his shoulder of him on the children playing, showing Rodriguez as he looks for his mark. How can any experienced director mess up basic blocking like this?

Though I must say, one thing Tyler Perry does well is making his heroines flawed. However, with his other characters just being either good or bad, it makes me question his inspiration behind making the protagonist imperfect. Does he write them this away because he is completely aware of the fact that all human beings are flawed, or is it one of his many contrivances, showing a bad girl becoming good with the help of God?

On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this film 5 out of 10. It wasn't awful but it wasn't good either.

Tyler Perry's only consistency as a film director is continuously cheating himself and his audience with flaccid, incompetent filmmaking. "I Can Do Bad All by Myself" is probably one of Tyler Perry's best films after the slightly better "The Family that Preys", but that speaks volumes of his overall body of work. If he wants to maintain his success, he will have to really learn and understand what quality filmmaking is all about.