Critic Reviews

It would have been better to nix the drama completely and keep Madea's Halloween outing strictly about the laughs.

Tyler Perry never wants to scare you, and I assure you, he never will. Perry DOES want to make you laugh though, succeeding when jokes are bite-size and contained – but most scenes ramble on and on as Madea searches for multiple ways to land the same punchline.

The whole thing eventually devolves into the maelstrom of reactionary moralizing that is Mr. Perry’s specialty, not that any informed viewer would have reason to expect otherwise

It’s another of Perry’s raucous and slovenly comedies of responsibility, which means that its heart is in a very old — and right — place. If only a message that was this solid equalled solid laughs.

The tone and plot of the film keeps swinging this way and that.

In its final moments, Boo! A Madea Halloween delivers a moral with after-school-special levels of subtlety. A jolting switch from oft-mean-spirited humor to a message movie, this comedy is unlikely to win over any new fans, but the devoted will find comfort in the familiarity.

Sprinkled among the desultory morass are occasional firecrackers of brilliant schtick-based comedy.

Wish it wasn’t so, I still find the character brash and cranky fun. But until Perry parts with a nickel and brings in funny people to goose his ideas into something wittier, Madea isn’t MIA, she’s DOA.

At 103 minutes, this film has way too much dead weight. Scenes are repeated over and over, and some of the acting would not cut it in a school play. But in the rare moments when Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween is firing on all cylinders, it displays a cleverness which hints that, with more time and a few more iterations of the script, this might have been a good movie.

Madea remains a distinctive, weirdly compelling character. Maybe someday Perry will make a good comedy for her.