Review: 'Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween' is scary bad
In his career as a writer, director, actor, mogul, and one-man filmmaking factory, Tyler Perry has given us shamelessly over-the-top demon-yuppie melodrama; exuberantly dirty-minded dress-up burlesque; squeaky-clean family soap opera; a rare bid for prestige with his 2010 adaptation of For Colored Girls; and, in last year’s Boo! A Madea Halloween, his message-movie version of a fright-night comedy. But with Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween, Perry pushes into novel terrain. He has made a slasher movie, or the satire of a slasher movie, or the world’s most purposefully ineffectual slasher movie, or something. Even if you’re just looking for a Tyler Perry night out, be very afraid. (One qualification: Uncle Joe gets some nasty good lines.)
On her 18th birthday, Tiffany (Diamond White), the parochial-school heroine of the first Boo!, with her normal-girl-meets-Teen-Vogue generic Barbie-doll hauteur, is invited to another Halloween frat party thrown by the geek muscleheads of Upsilon Theta. Perry stages an expository scene in front of the frat house that feels like it takes 10 rambling minutes to establish that, yes, the character of Jonathan (Yousef Erakat), who’s like Vin Diesel crossed with Arnold Horshack, is still on board as Tiffany’s unlikely love interest; and that the party will take place at Derrick Lake, a woodsy Friday the 13th sort of place where a handful of kids were murdered on a fateful night in 1976. Tiffany’s dad, Brian, played by Perry in one of those roles that requires no stylized costume and no sense of humor, thinks it would be a terrible idea for her to go to the party. But he’s overruled by his ex-wife (Taja V. Simpson), who has just given Tiffany her own car: a snazzy burnt-orange Mini-Cooper.
If Hollywood has learned how to do anything over the last 40 years, it’s to charge a frat party with mad energy. But the party in Boo 2! makes you think, “Yes, this really does look like it was shot at Tyler Perry’s film studio in Atlanta,” because it’s threadbare in the worst way: perfunctorily lit and even more thinly written. The guys and girls gather, and there isn’t a halfway interesting character among them. Then the DJ fades out, the dancing stops, and the banal mock terror commences.
The couples who sneak off to make out encounter a spectral figure with long black hair covering her face, like the girl in the Ring films, the hair then parting to reveal a slashed face that makes you wonder: Did Perry intend this to look like a special effect bought in a costume shop? (The answer, it turns out, is yes, though that doesn’t make it satisfying.) And that’s just a warm-up for a pair of mad killers wearing gas masks and wielding chainsaws.
The reason this is supposed to be funny is that Madea has taken it upon herself to rescue Tiffany from the certain horror of a party at Lake Derrick (though given that there hadn’t been an incident there in 41 years, you’d think everyone could relax a bit). Driving over there in her beat-up Cadillac, she brings along her cranky ancient posse, including Aunt Bam (Cassi Davis), her lips welded into a defensive frown, and Hattie (Patrice Lovely), with her lispy baby voice that can mangle any syllable known to man.
Mostly, though, there is the Joe (played by Perry), who in Boo 2 takes over the role of the Outrageous Force of Nature previously played by Madea. He’s a lewd and crusty old man who fancies himself a pimp, and Perry gives him some lines that are simultaneously groan-worthy and funny in their utter lack of taste or correctness. “You had the pony,” says Joe to his divorced daughter-in-law, “you didn’t have the stallion!” When he’s told to pray for Tiffany, he says, “No! Pimps don’t pray. The ho’s is the prey!” (Hey, I don’t write this stuff, I just report it.) It’s not that the lines are good, or even that they’re supposed to be — it’s that Tyler Perry so believes in the chintzy awfulness of their 20th-century inner-city strut. Joe is the one character in the movie who’s impervious to fear, because he’s so caught up in his geriatric blaxploitation nostalgia.
Tyler Perry hasn’t generally been in the business of sequels, but apart from Joe’s overly pickled soul-food dialogue, this one has a joyless, obligatory, cardboard feeling that marks it as one of Perry’s least satisfying films. At this point, he should do something a little nutty, like a Madea biopic — or, better yet, try to pack some of the richer intrigue he achieved in his television series The Haves and Have Nots into the movies. The box office, of course, will probably vindicate Boo 2!, but it’s time for Tyler Perry to throw a monkey wrench into the assembly line.
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