Boo 2!: A Madea Halloween (2017)

Boo 2!: A Madea Halloween (aka Tyler Perry's Boo 2! a Madea Halloween) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

While I never much cared for the saccharine and timid nature of Tyler Perry's comedy, I couldn't deny there was at least a moral core to his absurdities of dressing up as the old, fat, and sassy Madea character. That trait seems strangely absent from Boo! A Madea Halloween 2, a horror comedy that seems more concerned with staging mild frights suitable for a church play than developing any meaningful themes about parenting. And it's just as embarrassing as a church play, gone awry in the desire to stage lackluster comedy and terror that I prayed for a boring sermon. At least that's territory Perry knows better.

This film barely qualifies as a story and more of a forgettable Halloween episode of a watered down Christian comedy. Perry once more plays a dad struggling to control her daughter. Unable to compete with his ex-wife giving his little girl a car for her birthday, the dad struggles to connect. But do we really care when he's dumb enough to hire a petting soon for her 17th birthday? A more human film would find Perry trying to better understand the mindset of his daughter and try to treat her more as an adult. But that just won't happen with cackling codgers like Madea and her troublesome ilk of bad news elders.

No, it is not Perry who is wrong but his daughter that has run off to a Halloween party at the spooky spot where some people were murdered years ago. There's some ho-hum teen drama about relationships and sex, which made me a little hopeful that something bad was about to go down when chainsaw wielding killers and spooky girls start popping up. But then I remembered this is a Tyler Perry movie and unless someone is abusing a wife, nobody will be killed. And so we have Scooby-Doo style hijinks where the dopey teenagers and the never-shut-up Madea crew will flee in fear from scary stuff. Sometimes they'll stop the chase and try to defy horror movie logic by standing their ground but this script doesn't even have a fraction of the smarts to savage that horror movie conventions.

I suppose the highlight of the picture is supposed to be Madea's sassy commentary but only because every other character seems to be a total bore of bland drama and forced stupidity. One of the worst characters that I can only assume Perry wants us to laugh along with is an old grandpa pal of Madea that loves to smoke weed. He finds himself alone in a car at one point trying to come on to a teenage girl with a very sleazy and uncomfortable manner of talk. Forget the ghosts and chainsaw-wielding maniacs; this dude creeps me out more than anything in this film. Was it supposed to be cute that he rambles and makes a sinister laugh as he talks about wanting to make out with a teenage girl?

The worst part of this Madea Halloween sequel is that it forces the parents-are-always-right message through the painfully awful staging of a prank of killers on the teenagers. Yes, the adults are never at fault. It's all the younger generation's problems that must be corrected, not the adults. The way for Perry's character to be a better adult isn't too learn more about his kid and talk to her earnestly but to stage haunted house theatrics and then shout at her to be a good girl. And, of course, the kids will fall in line easily because movies. The logic here is that teenagers sneaking off to have sex is dangerous but old people trying to proposition teenagers for sex is just good old Tyler Perry comedy. I have a feeling even Church-goers would find themselves a tad queasy with this baffling mess of blending Christian parenting with scares not fit for a haunted house.