Who's in It: Tyler Perry, Janet Jackson, Jill Scott, Sharon Leal, Malik Yoba, Richard T. Jones, Tasha Smith, Michael Jai White, Denise Boutte
The Basics: It's Secrets & Lies, Tyler Perry style, as four African-American couples go on their annual group vacation to the mountains. But everything — from infidelity to resentments to plain old irreconcilable differences — conspires to tear the four foursomes apart. Not to worry, though. There's no such thing as an unhappy ending for decent, clean-living, working-class and/or upscale professionals in a Tyler Perry movie.
What's the Deal? This one can live on the same shelf as his previous movie, Daddy's Little Girls. It's competently directed (more or less), competently acted (minus Janet Jackson as a walking, talking block of wood), it stacks the deck in favor of good people and then those good people reap the niceness they've sewn. It's completely simple-minded but also mostly inoffensive, unlike the brain-damaged Madea movies that bought Perry several multimillion-dollar mansions on both coasts. Oh well.
Auteur Alert: Unlike a check-grabbing directorial hack, you can spot a filmmaker with a vision, one with a personal investment in his/her work by the recurrence of similar themes and visual signifiers. And now that I've seen all four of his theatrically released features, here's what I've come up with. Tyler Perry seems obsessed with the following:
1. Characters who talk a lot about praying even when they're not actually doing any praying.
2. Class differences. His characters are scrappy, noble and working class, or they are dangerous ghetto thugs and "bad women," or they are stratospherically successful professionals. You can't just be a lawyer in his movie, you're a "top litigator" or "a bestselling author" or "a leading pediatrician."
3. Catfights among women, or one strong woman (aka Perry in drag) knocking justice into peoples' heads.
4. Men in their underwear.
Best Moment in the Screening I Attended: Perry hates film critics. Won't allow critics to see his films in advance. So I bought a ticket opening day. When Jill Scott comes onscreen for the first time, takes off her coat and reveals her very big self, several audience members openly hooted and hollered at her size. This prompted a woman in front of me to scream, "SHUT YOUR MOUTHS! JILL SCOTT IS COOLER THAN ALL OF Y'ALL!"