Subplots, including a half-hearted treatise on bullying and an adorable little boy (Noah Urrea) with dreams of singing in the Christmas pageant, are scattered artlessly here and there, as are bit roles for long-forgotten viral video sensations Antoine “Bed Intruder” Dodson and Kimberly “Sweet Brown” Wilkins.įilm Review: ‘Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas’ Other comic setpieces range from amiably cliched (Madea’s malaprop-heavy summary of the Book of Luke) to jaw-droppingly awful, reaching a particularly painful nadir when Larry’s ghost-themed sexual role playing causes Eileen to mistake him for a Klansman.
However predisposed (or not) one might be to appreciating their signature personae, Perry and Larry’s scenes together are easily the highlights of the film, as they at least provide these shticksters with the opportunity to bounce old-timey banter off one another, rather than simply performing to the camera. (The decision to cast a black woman as the unrepentant bougie bigot who confuses her white in-laws for “the help” could have been interestingly subversive in other hands, though Perry does very little with it.) Furthermore, the corporate sponsor for the town jubilee turns out to be the very same company that built the dam that ruined the local farmlands, though this seems to matter far less to the townsfolk than the company’s insistence on secularizing the Christmas festivities, which allows Perry to throw some particularly patronizing scraps of red meat to any Bill O’Reilly devotees who may have wandered into the theater. More complications arise when Conner’s hayseed parents (Larry the Cable Guy, Kathy Najimy), arrive in town for a visit, with the whole family now enlisted to continue Lacey’s charade for the increasingly unpleasant Eileen. Also inexplicably in tow with Madea and Eileen is Lacey’s high-school boyfriend, Oliver (JR Lemon), a corporate bigwig of some kind with whom Lacey has reconnected while seeking a corporate sponsor for her school’s annual Christmas jubilee, which the local farmers rely on financially after a newly built dam decimated their crops.
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