Who's In It: Tyler Perry, Janet Jackson, Jill Scott, Sharon Leal, Malik Yoba, Richard T. Jones, Tasha Smith, Michael Jai White, Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson
The Basics: Four couples go on vacation to the Bahamas and wind up seeing all of their relationships nearly fall apart once they get back home to Atlanta. One wife is cheating on her upstanding husband; one is so insanely jealous (the super into-it Tasha Smith, who deserves some sort of award) of her non-cheating husband that she screams nonstop from start to finish in her effort to ferret out the alleged "ho's"; one woman springs a no-reason-in-particular divorce on her baffled spouse, a move that drives them both to the brink of insanity; and the fourth faces financial trouble and the re-appearance of the wife's abusive ex. It's like Couples Retreat but with more actual misery flying at your face every two minutes.
What's The Deal: Every once in a while, and you can't predict when it's going to happen, Tyler Perry surprises you with a film that lives at least in the same zip code as reason, sensitivity and logic. (I'm not counting the Madea films. They're exempt from logic and should stay that way.) And then there's this movie. I've seen every Tyler Perry project and I hereby crown this one the most balls-out stupid of his career to date. It's got bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, bad everything. There are lengthy scenes near the beginning in which characters simply walk around looking at furniture and tropical views and talking about how lovely it all is in a way that approaches a level of otherwordly nothingness usually reserved for inept cult-of-badness movies like The Room. There are plot twists that come out of nowhere only to be discarded like they don't matter, entire storylines that make no sense with resolutions that will BLOW YOUR MIND. In other words, it demands to be seen in order to be believed. And now I'm going to give away major chunks of lunacy, so if you don't want to know the details then stop reading here. But trust me, you want to know about...
A Short List Of Craziness: The ashes of a corpse accidentally spilled on a major character, Cicely Tyson accent-confusion, a parade of apocalyptic Jill Scott wigs, casual alcoholism for one character and then later some leftfield surprise alcoholism for another and then surprise cancer for someone else, face-biting and other random domestic violence, Janet Jackson smashing up a whole house with a golf club screaming "I'LL SHOW YOU CRAZY!!" (nice Obsessed shout-out there, Damita Jo) mistaken identities, gunfire, the brandishing of knives and characters reciting love philosophies like, "Pure love will never return to you void."
But Wait, It Gets Better: The grand climax involves a drag queen popping out of a cake to "It's Raining Men" while Janet Jackson shouts at her future ex-husband, "You wanna be a bitch then here's your man!" which in turn causes him to freak out, run off and drive his car straight into oncoming traffic. It's like there was a Who Can Be the Most Insanely Homophobic contest going on and this movie decided it was in it to win it. Lovers of out of control badness, go buy your tickets RIGHT NOW.