Madea Goes to Jail (2009)

I made it one of my movie watching goals for the year to finally see a Tyler Perry movie. Now I have seen movies with Tyler Perry in them before, like Gone Girl, or Vice in which he plays Colin Powell, but I had never seen a "Tyler Perry movie". Mr. Perry has had tremendous success as a kind of nitch market media figure catering to black audiences. In addition to being an actor and playwright he has his own studio in Atlanta, and has produced shows for television both sitcoms and dramas. However he is best known for dressing in drag as his character Madea a tough, strong willed elderly black woman. I thought Madea Goes to Jail sounded like a good entry point for that work, anticipating something akin to Ernest Goes to Jail, which is not what I got.

I am glad that I watched the other Perry movie trailers first on the DVD (I saw this movie through DVD.com, aka old school Netflix). I am glad because they prepped me somewhat for just being deposited in the sprawling interconnected world of the Madeaverse. From the previews I learned that there are movies about the Browns, Madea's daughter Cora married into that family, and apparently at the end of the last "Browns" movie Madea was in a high speed car chase for which she has been arrested at the start of this movie. Eventually in the course of this movie Madea does land in jail, but not for the car chase, she gets off on that do to a legal technicality. In fact her being in this story almost seems like a technicality, because Madea being in jail is really the secondary storyline in Madea Goes to Jail. The primary storyline concerns a young lawyer in the DA's office (Derek Luke) trying to save a childhood friend (The Cosby Show's Keshia Knight Pulliam) from a life in prostitution. It gets fairly dark and heavy, and the contrast to Madea's antics in the same film is so tonally odd and unexpected that I found it kind of fascinating. I am going to have see at least one more of these Madea films to see how common that is.

Going in I was frankly suspecting I would probably hate this film, I didn't hate it, it was watchable, I just didn't understand it. I don't understand how a market for a black based hybrid comedy/ Lifetime movie composite exists. I must learn more, I will have to revisit it's universe, because this market obviously does exist because Madea Goes to Jail made $90.5 million at the box office off of a $17.5 million budget. Something of a puzzler, but surprisingly watchable, I was never really board, and what should have been tonal whiplash didn't feel it, at lest not that bad, the transitions were surprisingly smooth. I am curious to see more. **