I Can Do Bad All By Myself: BD Review
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Page 1 of 3 Lionsgate / 113 Minutes / 2009 / Rated PG-13 / Street Date: January 12, 2010
In I Can Do Bad All By Myself, our protagonist is April (Taraji P. Henson), a hard-living, steady-boozing nightclub singer, and she's a powderkeg. The movie that Henson participates in is an endlessly plain affair, a movie filled with cliche and disappointingly pedestrian dramatic structure, but this Academy Award-nominated actress somehow finds a way to infuse her sot of a character with a big, bold sense of lived-in truism. In fact, her take on the character is so intriguing that it makes all other elements of the film seem entirely unnecessary. Cross-dressing aunts, Mexican handymen with hearts of gold, rabble-rousing kids - if Henson's presence wasn't so deliciously gin-soaked, I Can Do Bad All By Myself would have all the makings of a grade-C afterschool special.
The film's story goes a little something like this: Three kids break into Madea's (Tyler Perry's) home, but instead of sending them straight to the police, Madea finds out that the kids' guardian grandma has gone M.I.A. for a number of days. Taking matters into her own hands, Madea drags said rugrats over to their aunt April's house (our beloved boozer) because she's the only blood relative nearby. April, of course, doesn't want them, and matters are worsened when a neighborhood pastor insists that April allow a Mexican immigrant named Sandino (Alex Rodriguez) to live in her basement, offering up handyman tasks in exchange for room and board. You see where this is going - April gets a chance in I Can Do Bad All By Myself to redeem her life, to turn it all around. Fans of Tyler Perry's work will no doubt have more affinity for the picture than this writer - somehow the guy can still pull off $20 million opening weekends with movies like this - but I Can Do Bad All By Myself is so run-of-the-mill that even the staunchest Perry defender would have to admit that this isn't exactly the best film of 2009. I'll give Tyler Perry this, though: I found Taraji P. Henson's performance in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to be a bit harried and overdone, but in this film, she's the real deal. The film may be a mess, but a star is born.... |
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