I grew up on Tyler Perry films and found them incredibly entertaining as a child, so watching them as an adult is interesting. Meet the Browns, follows a single Chicago mother, Brenda, who in wake of her estranged father’s death, travels to Georgia and meets her unseen side of family. The comedic intensity of the Browns on top of Brenda going through the motions of a new love interest makes it an adequate and predictable sit-down family film. A positive aspect of it is that it’s a surface level comedic movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously and just does its job in telling a story focused on on the struggles of single parenting, family, and faith. A negative aspect of it is that what Tyler Perry finds to be entertaining is actually quite bland and stereotypical. Like most of his work, it leans into one dimensional, unoriginal depictions of blackness and gender. You see this in how Harry is the desirable light skin man that acts as Brenda’s saving grace and the Brown family being the coonish source of entertainment. Now that I’m older, I believe that willingly turning off your critical thinking skills is the only way you can perceive any of his work as having actual quality to them.
Oh wow, that is a great way of phrasing it ("turning off your critical thinking skills"). It brings up the difference in reception of a Perry film compared with a film from comedians like Martin Lawrence or Kevin Hart. Somehow Perry is held to a higher standard than those guys, perhaps because he tries to infuse family values into his stories.