Tyler Perry's Meet The Browns DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

I'm pretty convinced that super-multi-hyphenate Tyler Perry is not of this Earth. Starting with his feature film directorial debut with Madea's Family Reunion, Perry has put out six films in not even three years - writing, directing and producing all of them - starring in some, writing songs for some and also shepherding two TV series to boot - directing and producing most of those episodes as well. Like I said... I don't think he's human. Then again, while I've only seen two of Perry's previous films (Madea's Family Reunion, Why Did I Get Married?), this is the worst of the Perry films I've seen, although it's still not terrible by any stretch.

What I think really hinders this flick is that it tries to cram way too much into the film and I found it rather odd that the play ran a good half-hour longer than the feature film itself. The film centers on the struggling Brenda Brown (Angela Bassett) a single mother of three who is barely scraping by living in the projects of Chicago. Still, she manages to be a good mother to her kids Michael (Lance Gross), a strapping young man who has quite a gift as a basketball player, the precocious Tosha (Chloe Bailey) and the young one Lena (Mariana Tolbert), trying to bring them up the best she can, even though she can barely put food on the table sometimes. She gets a strange letter telling her that her father that she had never met, had died, with bus tickets to Atlanta to see the side of the family she had never met: the Browns. After she loses her job and seemingly all hope, she's persuaded by her caustic friend Cheryl (Sofia Veraga) to go to Atlanta to see if this father she never met left him anything in the will. When she gets there, she gets way more than she bargained with in the Browns along with a handsome basketball coach (Rick Fox) who thinks her son has talent, and thinks she's a MILF as well.

While the film does serve up plenty of poignant moments throughout, this seems to be lacking a certain something here. For one, the humor just isn't quite here as much as I would've liked. Oddly enough, newcomer David Mann, a Tyler Perry mainstay on the stage as Mr. Leroy Brown, does quite a wonderful job reprising his role for the silver screen, but it just seems that Perry didn't' write as good of material for him this time around. A lot of the jokes they go for here don't quite work and, while Mann is certainly an amazing new comedic talent to keep an eye on, I just hope Perry writes some better stuff for him on their new Meet the Browns cable series than he did here. Aside from that, Perry also gets us quite confused and embroiled in family drama among the Browns, who you can hardly keep straight (or who's parents/siblings/etc. are whom) and a lot of this family strife just seemed unnecessary, especially when you have a situation rife with drama as it is, with a long lost daughter coming into the family. A lot of this really does nothing for the main story as well and a lot of the fluff could've easily been trimmed and would've given Perry more room to advance the story in a smoother way.

While David Mann and his real-life wife Tamela Mann are raucously funny as Leroy Brown and his daughter Cora (I know, kind of weird, right?), it seems they were relied upon for the entire brunt of the comedic weight here, and there isn't enough of a balance between the drama and the comedy here, since it's almost all drama. What I really enjoyed about Madea's Family Reunion was it was a great comedy that was blended with the perfect mix of dramatic elements, and it seems reversed here, with the dramatic elements that aren't that original to begin with. A lot of this feels like Boyz in tha Hood, with Bassett almost playing a sort of remake of her Reva Styles role, but this time she's the mom in the hood trying to protect her son from all the evils of the projects, keeping them from turning to illegal activities, while barely holding onto a roof over their head. While her performance is great, as usual, as Brenda Brown, I just couldn't get into the character that much because it's one we've seen so many times before - the proud woman who doesn't want help and wants to do it on her own... but gets help in unexpected places and yada yada yada. I really wasn't a fan of former NBA star Rick Fox in his biggest acting role to date, as a basketball scout who has an eye for talent... and the talent's mom. For as big of a guy as he is, he doesn't have much presence on screen and whenever he's asked to do lighter material, it just seems forced and like he's going to crack up at any second. He doesn't do too bad with some of the more serious parts, but I can't see a career in comedy for this former hoopster. While but I was insanely annoyed by Sofia Veraga's small part as Brenda's over-the-top friend Cheryl, do look for a hilarious offering from the boisterous and outlandish Jenifer Lewis who is awesome as the loudmouth Aunt Vera and Lance Gross does a fine job as the conflicted young Michael Brown. Oh yeah. There also is a brief bit with Tyler Perry himself as Madea, in a tiny part that seems to set up her new film, Madea Goes to Jail.

Overall, Meet the Browns isn't the best from Tyler Perry, but maybe it does prove that he's human after all, because this isn't up to snuff from his normal work.

We get a few nice bonus features on this disc (the second disc of this "special edition" is a Digital Copy disc). First up is Meet the Mann's, which gives us a little intro into the hilarious David Mann, who plays Leroy Brown, and his wife Tamela Mann, who plays his daughter, Cora Brown in the film. They've both worked with Tyler Perry in his plays and we hear a little from Perry, Bassett, Lamann Rucker, producer Reuben Cannon. They go a little farther than most of these featurettes and we actually go into the Mann's actual house and hear from the two in a hilarious fashion, with them keeping interrupting each other. It's pretty damn funny folks... probably as funny as most of the movie. It's 11 minutes long and a great way to start these features.

Angela and Rick: Meet the Lovebirds is next and it's the same sort of thing as the last featurette, but regarding Angela Bassett and Rick Fox. It starts out with everyone talking up Bassett and then we get an interesting story from Perry of how he first cast Rick Fox - he was thinking about the role and driving in his car... when he almost ran over Fox on a crosswalk in L.A. Small world, eh? This one is a little shorter, just over seven minutes, and it's not as funny, of course, but not too bad.

The Browns are Born: The Story of Meet the Browns is next and this one goes over the play and we get some good stuff about the following that the play had during its run, but, we don't get a ton about how it was translated into the film. I haven't seen the play, but they say in here that the play and movie are quite different as the play seems to be more of a centerpiece for David Mann's character, which I actually would've loved to see more of in the film. Maybe I'll have to check out the play on video now... Anyway, this feature is about seven minutes long and gives some decent info on how the Browns all started.

The last thing we get here is Jenifer Lewis: Unleashed, and this is a hilarious way to end these features. Lewis is really unleashed here in this six-minute featurette where we mostly hear from her in an outrageously awesome fashion, and we get other bits from Perry and David Mann singing her praises, and rightfully so. Her bits from the press junket, though, are the best of the whole feature and you can hear people in the background laughing some of the time as well from her outrageous quotes. Great stuff folks.

The film is presented in the widescreen format, in the 1.78:1 aspect ratio.

The sound is handled through either the Dolby Digital 5.1 format or the Dolby Digital 2.0 format.

Fairly plain here. The front features a prominent shot of Bassett and Fox getting close in the foreground with the crazy Brown clan in the background with a big title card and a little picture of Perry's Madea hanging on the W in Browns.The back features a big shot of David Mann's Leroy Brown, a shot of other Brown family members, along with a decent synopsis, "special features" listing, about half of which are tech specs, a Digital Copy notice plus the billing block. Nothing too fancy, but not terrible, I guess.

Meet the Browns is another solid tale from Tyler Perry, but probably one of his worst films to date because it tries to do too much in ways we've seen too many times before.