Chapter 6: Popping My Tyler Perry Cherry

There are movies that can inspire, make us dreamers, believers, advocates and activists. Movies that can make us feel young and transport us to places where our imaginations can take flight. Then there are travesties, calamities outright catastrophes catapulting our soaring imaginations into absolute wrecks. In the case of Tyler Perry's Why Did I get Married Too? (2010) its an 747 nose diving into a train wreck adjacent to a firework factory with a daycare center.

I had a rough outline of what I was going to talk about in this chapter. I was going to go into a half-serious discussion on the plight of African American movie makers and the unfair criticisms lobbed at Tyler Perry and his brand of comedy. Perhaps I could have made a few poignant remarks on the positive representation of African American family life portrayed in his films and his underlying morality that permeates all his big-screen efforts...but no. This movie deserves no high-minded discussions or watered-down socio-economic pandering. This movie sucks plain and simple.

The clunky first act fakes you into a false sense of security. There was nothing particularly loathsome about it; Corny, stilted dialogue awkward staging, bad acting, nothing worth face-palming over. But after the three couples (and the awkward divorced dude) get back home, things get Days of Our Lives meets Jerry Springer and we, the audience are struck by septic tanks brimming with excrement passing for emotional drama. Literally everything is thrown at you at once: suspicions of infidelity, alcoholism, divorce, unemployment, cancer; the film is an evil twin brother and a bugger of a mystery away from an Agatha Christie novel. In a regular melodrama about family, marriage and divorce its kosher to throw things like dinner plates around when things get heated but to humiliate someone in front of their co-workers with a pink-haired male stripper popping out of a fake cake, now that's a Tyler Perry movie!

Watching the final scene where the character Patricia (Janet Jackson) meets Dwayne the Rock Johnson a year after being an accessory to the death of her husband (via male pink-haired stripper) was the final crotch punch in this battery of a film. The false assumption that she, or anyone in the film was the least bit sympathetic is simply unreal. As a result I am seriously considering this film to join the ranks of the worst I have ever seen. My bottom five have previously gone thusly: Monkeybone (2001), Rollerball (2002), House of the Dead (2003), Date Movie (2006) and North (1994). All deserve the collective scorn of millions yet this movie may very well blow them all out of the water...for blowing so damn hard!

Just how bad is it? Here is a list of things I would rather do than watch this movie ever again.
1. Watch The Pirates of Penzance being performed by a school of deaf children.
2. Be the back end of a thirty person human centipede.
3. Walk down Harlem at night with a glow in the dark spandex suit of the Confederate Flag.
4. Spend the day with Larry the Cable Guy.
5. Vote for Rick Santorum.
6. Watch all seven seasons of The Gilmore Girls.
7. Do all the stunts from Jackass 3 (2010).
8. Go streaking across the stage of Jeopardy while yelling "Who is Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn".
9. Hang upside down for the length of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (directors cut).
10. Have to listen to "Party in the U.S.A." by Miley Cyrus and ONLY that song for the rest of my life.

You think I'm joking? Just try to get me to watch this celluloid pox on our houses again and you bet I'll be "moving my hips like yeah".