After reading the other user reviews here on IMDb, I had low expectations walking into the theater today.... Did we watch the same movie?!
The movie starts out slow and beats a few jokes to death with excessive sarcasm and a convoluted concocted storyline. Definitely a film directed towards a non-white audience; it busted on all the white stereotypes, particularly the 'greedy wall street banker' and 'obliviously ignorant racist' ones. In a theater of 75 people, I was the only white person - awesome! I have no problem laughing at myself and knew it was going to be a fun movie with an interactive audience - and I was not disappointed :-)
With the previous Madea movies, the story tends to be more of a romance/drama, with Madea thrown in for some comic relief and wisdom. I was pleased to see that this was intended to be a straight-up comedy. Some parts of the movie flow more smoothly than others, the jokes are nothing new, and the story line is nothing ground-breaking, but it succeeds in pulling off a lot of slapstick humor... ultimately a raucous comedy that the crowd was hooting, hollering and giving hearty laughter. Like most things in NYC, the people are half the fun - being the only whitey in the room made it all the more authentic :-)
If you're looking for a thought-provoking, nuanced, 'fresh' movie, this isn't it. If you're looking for some good laughs and 2 hours of entertainment, come and see it!
Stay for the outtakes at the end credits - they are some of the funniest scenes :-)
