Eventually, we're treated to a cuddly moral lesson - not to mention some Christmas caroling. Guy and costar Kathy Najimy, who plays his wife, have a hoot injecting improv into the film.)įamily trauma ensues, with Madea playing peacemaker between Eileen and Lacey. Not only is he bearded, not only is he Caucasian - but also he has Larry the Cable Guy as his dad! (Mr. Lacey's mother is shocked to find that her girl has shacked up with a guy named Connor (Eric Lively). Eileen is intent on driving to Lacey's home in rural Alabama, and she offers to pay Madea to come along. Her niece, Eileen (Anna Maria Horsford), who got her the Santa gig, tells her she's worried about her daughter, schoolteacher Lacey (a terrific Tika Sumpter), who has refused to come home for Christmas. The Santa scenes are terrible, tasteless - and some of the funniest work Tyler's Madea has done on screen. Rude, mean-spirited, and uncompromising, she gets herself fired. Madea's not exactly a hit with customers. "I look like a whole damn red-light district!" the old girl says about the outfit she has to wear. The story opens with Madea in a part she was born to play: a department-store Santa. All delivered with the usual crude jokes and sexual innuendos that earn Madea films their PG-13 rating. Slapdash, with dialogue and plot points that were cliches in Dickens' era, the pic sends up, then reaffirms, all the values the media sell us each holiday: compassion, forgiveness, tolerance. Perry puts on the makeup, applies those terrifying prosthetics, and squeezes into Madea's not-so-frilly outfits for his eighth outing as the fearless truth-teller in the upbeat offering Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas. She's the last person I'd ever want as an aunt or, heaven help me, a mom. I must admit, with some trepidation (lest her legions of fans tear me apart), that I've never understood the appeal of Tyler Perry's wildly popular Madea, the 6-foot-4 bully-girl of a busybody Perry introduced on stage in 1999's I Can Do Bad All by Myself and on the big screen six years later in Diary of a Mad Black Woman.
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