![]() ![]() Levy brings a great deal of humor to the film (as does Denise Richards, who plays his yoga-loving trophy wife), but his subplot, in which he’s ushered into witness protection after taking the fall in a corporate Ponzi scheme, has less inherent pathos than, say, the story of a young woman whose abusive fiancée won’t allow her to leave him, which was the robust plot of Madea’s Family Reunion. ![]() One of the most striking things about Madea’s Witness Protection, then, is that it hews more closely to the tone of a comedy than perhaps any Perry film before it, largely because the typical struggling-black-woman subplot has been exchanged for one about a hapless white man named George Needleman, played by Eugene Levy. (Perry is an exemplary manager of tone, oscillating back and forth between seriousness and slapstick wildly that he manages to juggle laughs and feeling without mucking the two is one of his defining qualities as a screenwriter and director, and it’s consistently the most interesting aspect of his work.) This formula has served Perry well, because it allows him to work a fully realized emotional center into films that might have otherwise played out as straight-up comedies-and because the drama becomes just as important as the laughs, it never feels like an afterthought. Most of the Madea movies are framed the same way: A young woman, often a victim of some form of abuse, struggles to find a way out of the lifestyle that binds her, often with the advice, support, or physical backing of Madea, who, much like Mexico’s Cantinflas, functions as both comic relief and moral backbone. ![]() Madea, the linebacker-sized mammy performed by Tyler Perry in drag, has always been either the sticking or selling point of the seven films in which she’s featured, and even though she usually exists only in the margins of her own movies, she’s the one element nobody forgets. ![]()
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