Meet the Browns (2008)

Meet the Browns is a tolerable albeit thoroughly bland effort by Tyler Perry, that manages to touch on sensitive, vital issues in the black community but also shortchange a great deal of those involved in the community into broad forgettable caricatures. Concerning the Brown family, as the title suggests, the film follows single-mother Brenda (Angela Bassett) living in Chicago with her oldest son Michael (Lance Gross) in high school and her two young daughters.One day, Brenda receives a death notice that states the father she has never met has died. Upon losing her job after the executives decide to pull the plug on her business's entire operation, Brenda packs up the kids and sets off for Georgia, quickly discovering the side of the family she never knew existed. Brenda is welcomed with open arms to meet a good-natured clan known as the Brown family, which also provide her with a release from Chicago's hectic environment and introduce her to the slower ways of Georgia.Meet the Browns is sufficient for both basic cable entertainment in addition to Tyler Perry's filmography, which always seems to find ways to incorporate more and more questionable film entries in there. If anything, the basic structure I just gave you is what the film manages to set up best; what it unfortunately does is squander relationships in the film in favor of too many pale and broad plotstrands that do nothing but muddle themes. There are various characters in Meet the Browns and they're all drawn very broadly, and their problems are never narrowed down to fit something that feels more human. Perry paints in broadstrokes here when he should be refining detail.Having said that, Meet the Browns does a nice job at telling us (or maybe reminding some) that there is a vicious cycle in the black community that is sad but true. It's the cycle of a teenager dropping out of school for momentary income to support a family but only getting wrapped up in a dirty, gritty business that seems to be trying to find new ways to kill you or finding themselves living paycheck-to-paycheck. This cycle is acknowledged when Michael, the ambitious basketball player who is in the middle of being hounded and recruited to college teams, offers to get a job while working in high school. Brenda, however, worries that his hours and paycheck will overshadow the importance of education and studies and he'll fall down this path of directionless behavior.When Perry finds underlying issues in the black community to bring up is when he's strong; when he's busy generalizing the community is when he's weak. Perry always seems to mean well but finds ways to dilute, skew, or completely contradict his own intended message and that has been his drawback from day one. However, with Meet the Browns, he hit a goldmine in terms of popularity, eventually incorporating the film's premise and characters into Perry's second sitcom, which went on to do solid numbers on Television. People obviously see things in Meet the Browns and its comedic/dramatic leverage that I have yet to find; wouldn't be the first time.Starring: Angela Bassett and Lance Gross. Directed by: Tyler Perry.

"Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns" starts off well enough with Angela Bassett playing a strong-willed single mother struggling to raise her three children amidst poverty and unemployment on the South Side of Chicago. But the movie quickly goes off the rails when Brenda receives a letter from a distant relative in Georgia informing her that her father - who was never a part of her life to begin with - has just died. With nothing left to lose, Brenda packs up the family and heads on down to the funeral to pay her respects to a man she's never met. While there she is introduced to the "crazy" Brown clan, a collection of broad comic stereotypes that even vaudeville would have rejected as too over-the-top. As to the film itself, any hint of authenticity is instantly crushed under the weight of lowbrow buffoonery, heavy-handed plot mechanics and a fairy tale view of the real world.Although he clearly means well, as a dramatist, Perry has never seen a shade of gray he couldn't reduce to simplistic black-and-white or a plot point he couldn't milk for all its melodramatic worth. All the men in the film, for instance, are either clowns, scumbags or knights-in-shining-armor, nothing in between. The gun shy Brenda - who has been hurt by so many men in the past that she finds it next to impossible to trust one ever again - has a certain depth to her character, but virtually everyone else becomes essentially a walking mouthpiece for what's right and wrong in the African-American community. And that simply doesn't make for very compelling drama.Of the actors, Bassett is nicely restrained and understated as always, and Lance Gross exhibits some genuine talent as Brenda's principled teenage son, but David Mann, Jenifer Lewis, Sofia Vergara, and even Perry himself, in a pointless cameo appearance as both Medea and Uncle Joe, are allowed to spin so out of control in their various shticks that they turn whole sections of the movie into little more than a circus freak show.Noble intentions notwithstanding, "Meet the Browns" is a true "drag" of a romantic comedy - in the most negative sense of that term.

Yes folks, Tyler Perry is back, with all the wifebeating, moralizing, home cookin' and inappropriate jokes about drugs and assault that his target audience (y'know, churchgoin' black folk) has come to expect and cherish (albeit with diminishing returns) from his films.Surprisingly here, he had a solid cast and a decent enough script that it could have been just as touching and funny as Madea's Family Reunion unexpectedly was, if he could just avoid the maudlin twists of melodrama, the manufactured strife that continually frustrated the film's otherwise successful attempts at ingratiation. Just when everything is going good, when you're touched even as the manipulation shows its seams, the find finds something to bring you down, be it a dredging of past, a miscommunication or even a preposterously-timed shooting, there's just something that makes you go, "Why?" Leave it be, it's working." The acting is not impeccable (that there's not a lot of subtlety or nuance involved in the proceedings goes without saying), but it has a charming down-home vibe to it; these characters feel lived in, even if they're obvious constructs. Tyler Perry's doppleganger Madea is featured on the cover and the menu screen, but really, other than a character attesting to being her daughter, Madea gets a whopping *one scene*, and it's completely, 100% superfluous to the story (she's getting chased by the cops while her flamboyant ex-husband watches on the local news), and at that, feels hideously tacked on.One point that intrigues me about the psyche of Tyler Perry, which, as stated in the Madea's review, is full-on for all to see, is his seeming distrust of full-blooded, dark-skinned black men. In all three films I've seen, the three major, romantically-involved, dark-skinned black male characters have been: a wifebeater, a wifebeater, and a man who threatens to beat his wife when she has the audacity to request long-overdue child support. While on the flipside, the women all find true love falling into the arms of genial, light-skinned black men of more caramel complexion, and I have to wonder if somewhere in his mind, there's some deep-seated rejection as the lighter skin is somehow "better", but he can't have her fall in love with a white man. Just something to think about.The film, like all of Perry's, is easy to watch and never becomes a chore, but where Diary of a Mad Black Woman was an ungainly monster that gave you whiplash in its genre shifts, and where Madea's Family Reunion managed to put it all together, Meet the Browns is situated right in the middle, with enough success to be pleasant, but enough mistakes to make you wish it was better.{Grade: 6.25/10 (high C+) / #19 (of 57) of 2008}

i had this misfortune of being dragged to this movie by my aunt Flo... She thought it would cheer her up after losing her pet Pomeranian to a pack of wild coyotes.This movie is about what you would expect from a light hearted romantic comedy, with one exception - it stars Tyler Perry!!! let's just cut to the chase, knowing that Tyler Perry was playing the part of "Medina" was disturbing to say the least. Apparently Tyler Perry enjoys dressing like and old woman and running around in support hose tossing out one-lines and acting like a fool... but for the rest of us, it's shear torture!!!! Tyler Perry as Medina is to comedy as a pack of coyotes is to a Pomeranian... i don't know what that means, but it's still funnier then this movie!