'Madea' suffers from split presentation

This latest venture delivers a disjointed message.

By Dan Moore

Published Feb. 23, 2009

At one point in "Madea Goes to Jail," the latest from Tyler Perry, the titular grandmother-cum-wrecking-ball steals a crane and uses it to destroy the red convertible that took her parking spot. At another point, a street-wise preacher, given tearful approval by both prostitutes and lawyers, delivers a heartfelt lesson on self-reliance and forgiveness, which Madea (played in winking drag by Perry himself) accepts solemnly. That odd bifurcation is what makes "Madea" so difficult to understand. It is about uncomfortably earnest speeches at some points, and firing a machine gun into a crowd of unwanted party guests at others.

Even the plot is best understood as two sections, joined by a courtroom coincidence. Madea, having committed several grandmotherly felonies over the course of her film career -- her persona is best summarized by the title of a book Perry wrote in character, "Don't Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings" -- is sentenced to five years in prison for a crime spree that would send characters less inclined toward inspiring and populist to a life term in Supermax.

Meanwhile, in what appears to be a completely different movie, Joshua Hardaway, a young lawyer with a heart of gold, runs into an old friend from college, Candace Washington, now a prostitute with a heart of gold. Some mysterious incident from their past makes him determined to help her, much to the chagrin of his conniving fiancé, who sends Washington to prison on trumped charges.

Washington and Madea meet in prison, but not for very long. In a few anticlimactic scenes Washington learns to forgive Hardaway for his college transgressions, and the prison's kingpin (played by Helga from "American Gladiators") learns not to make a black woman take off her earrings, or something to that effect. Hardaway and Washington get married, and the public inexplicably decides five years for attempted murder and grand theft auto is outrageous. End of the movie.

The story's machinations and intentions are so quaint as to be almost pleasant. Hardaway and Washington are separated by both a mustache-twirling villain and the kind of turn-of-the-century had-I-but-known suspense that has the two of them talking vaguely with each other about the incident in their past so as to avoid inadvertently understanding each other and ending the movie too soon.

That imperfect, at least ostensibly moral intent is what finally keeps this film watchable. A crass movie made this badly comes out like "Big Momma's House," concerned primarily with erection jokes and the apparently universal humor of watching a big old lady beat up young men. "Madea Goes to Jail" at least means well. To compare it to another recent release, at least the bungled moral of this thin story is not "If you like football and nailing chicks, bro, totally go to a cheer camp."