Eileen is so contemptuous of whites, for example, that Lacey can’t work up the nerve to tell her mother that she’s married the aforementioned impossibly perfect farmer-god. But just a few scenes later, Madea and Eileen are driving to Alabama to visit Lacey as if nothing has happened.Įileen apparently thinks nothing of her dear friend publicly humiliating her while broadcasting her contempt for Eileen’s workplace, which is astonishing, since otherwise, Eileen’s defining characteristic is being incredibly judgmental and unsparing. When she’s fired, Madea shovels money out of the cash register and steals dresses from the racks while screaming invectives at her bosses and the customers. That kind of sequence undoubtedly plays like gangbusters onstage, where the wild mugging of both Perry and the outraged customers are pitched to the rafters, but it dies such an egregious death onscreen that it could use a braying laugh track just to establish it’s supposed to be funny. In a not entirely unexpected turn of events, Madea loses her customer-service position after peppering the customers with roast-style insults. Perry’s abysmal Christmas romp-which started life as a 2011 stage musical-begins with Eileen, who works at a fancy department store, getting Madea a Christmastime job there, despite firsthand knowledge of Madea’s Tourette’s-like inability to censor herself. The company, which has financially destroyed the small town with its shady practices, requires that said jubilee be filled with songs about Santa Claus and White Christmases instead of hymns explicitly glorifying Christ as humanity’s savior-a move the film treats as essentially re-crucifying Him. It’s also not-so-secretly a shot fired in the neverending War On Christmas, which exists primarily in the paranoid delusions of Fox News commentators.Ī Madea Christmas takes on the forces who want to remove explicit references to Christ’s divinity from public spaces through a subplot that finds an evil construction company donating $100,000 to fund a holiday jubilee with an ominous stipulation. But the red-hot issue of interracial relationships isn’t the only item on the film’s misplaced agenda. Yes, A Madea Christmas tackles what it imagines to be an explosive social issue in 2013-interracial relationships-with a ham-fisted awkwardness that makes 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner look like an explosive, ahead-of-its-time exposé by comparison. Little does Eileen realize that Conner, who is also an agricultural super-genius and looks like an underwear model, is actually her daughter’s husband. Horsford completely dominates the film as an evil matriarch who sneers at lusty white farmhand Conner (Eric Lively) for being arrogant enough to consider himself the equal of Eileen’s schoolteacher daughter Lacey (Tika Sumpter). It’s a measure of the film’s staggering miscalculation that both wildly popular (and wildly despised) performers are overshadowed to the point of being negated by the dreadfulness of Anna Maria Horsford’s performance as Madea’s niece and foil, Eileen.
The film’s primary attraction, beyond its Yuletide setting, is the crowd-pleasing showdown between Tyler Perry’s Madea and Larry The Cable Guy, those towering titans of lowbrow culture. The filmmakers know all too well that Christmas movies don’t really have to be good to be commercially successful and live in perpetuity on basic cable they just have to be Christmassy. It tosses itself into the tinsel-strewn trash heap alongside Deck The Halls, Christmas With The Kranks, Surviving Christmas, and all the other yucky exercises in casual misanthropy that cynically piggy-back on the public’s enduring affection for all things Christmas. A Madea Christmas belongs to a rancid strain of Yuletide trifles that feature awful people being terrible to each other for 90 minutes under the sway of insulting plot contrivances before the awfulness is climactically washed away in an avalanche of holiday sentimentality.