Movie Review - Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself

Starring Taraji P. Henson, Tyler Perry, Gladys Knight, Mary J. Blige, and Adam Rodriguez
Directed by Tyler Perry

The flick starts off rather promisingly with a hot-looking Taraji P. Henson sporting a nifty afro singing a sultry song in a slightly sleazy bar. Unfortunately, after those initial five minutes, everything just goes downhill.

Henson is April, a nightclub singer struggling to make it by week to week, as evidenced by the fact that we're told that her house is run-down (we, as an audience never really see this...to us, the house looks like it's in moderately good shape). At the same time we're being introduced to April, we also see three kids (who, come to find out are April's niece and nephews) breaking into crazy old Madea's house attempting to steal her VCR. Of course, big sassy Madea will have none of that, but as she begins to beat up the kids, she realizes that these young'ens may be in bad shape. The kids say that their parents have died and that they're living with their grandmother who has gone missing for the past few days. Madea takes the kids to their Aunt April's house, and, you guessed it, after an initial trepidation to take in the kids, April ends up being won over by the concept of family and all is well in the end.

Yep, I ruined the ending for you...but it's not as if you couldn't see it coming from the first seconds of the flick. Tyler Perry writes everything so that it is paint-by-numbers. There's no surprises here in the slightest. It doesn't help that it is poorly directed and shot. There are very few shots that contain two people in them -- it's mostly a shot of one person talking, then another person talking, then back to the other person talking. And then there's shots where the extras literally stand in front of the camera blocking the view of what we're supposed to be seeing. And everything was obviously shot on a soundstage...nothing looks remotely real. Incredibly poorly shot and directed.

Let's not forget the completely unnecessary musical interludes -- there's six of them, I think, and we see whole entire songs sung that really serve no purpose except to get reaction shots of April as she's listening to them. Granted, the songs sounded nice and Gladys Knight and Mary J. Blige have decent voices, but there is no point at all to these songs playing out in their entirety in the movie. Add to that, the character of Madea (the only part of this movie that actually worked...which was different from his last effort for me where the character didn't really work at all) disappears in the final 45-60 minutes, never to return except during the unfunny bloopers in the credits.

And none of the actors do Perry's poor script any favors. Henson, who started out fine in those first five minutes where she was singing, falls apart after that. It's like she went to the Sassy Black Actress School to learn what the stereotype of an angry African-American woman should be. The kids in the flick were just as bad...really, no one here was any good.

The RyMickey Rating: D-