Diary Of A Mad Black Woman | ||||
Darren Grant Kimberly Elise, Steve Harris, Shemar Moore, Tyler Perry, Cicely Tyson, Tamara Taylor, Lisa Marcos, Tiffany Evans 2005 |
Ethnic profiling isn't the issue when dealing with a film as difficult to watch as "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," a (surely) well-meaning African-American dramedy top-loaded with heavy-handed slapstick, you-go-girl moralizing and Christian proselytizing. Bad is bad in any color. The script is the amateurish brainchild of writer/actor Tyler Perry, who adapted his play of the same name and plays multiple roles that owe too much to earlier on-screen caricatures by Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. Perry, not a small man, cross-dresses to play Madea, a sassy, pistol-packin' matriarch; he also limps through scenes as a horny, vulgar old man. Lawrence's fat matron in "Big Momma's House" and Murphy's blimp-sized members of the Klump family in "The Nutty Professor" look like genius by comparison. The "Mad Black Woman" of the title isn't Madea; it's Helen (Kimberly Elise), the attractive-but-neglected-and-disrespected wife of a wealthy, powerful Atlanta lawyer. Helen's husband Charles (Steve Harris) has cheated on her for years and decides to dump her for the other woman. Worse, he's trying to get out of paying Helen anything as a divorce settlement. In a spate of meddling, Madea encourages Helen to seek revenge on Charles and take up with a handsome, God-fearing moving man (Shemar Moore). Wavering between sanctimony and dismal burlesque, this "Diary" should have stayed in a dresser drawer. | |||
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