If Tyler Perry gets an Oscar nomination for his acting in Madea Goes to Jail, can a washed-up actress scold him for taking away female roles? Actually, could it just be Cuba Gooding Jr. in drag, a la Boat Trip?
Seriously, though, Madea won’t be up for any Academy Awards next year, but damn is Perry’s character popular. Enough that the sassy matriarch has now evolved from a supporting character into the star of her own vehicle (which gave the filmmaker his biggest opening yet this past weekend). Yes, it’s true that Madea is a central figure in most of Perry’s films and has previously been the main protagonist in his plays (including the one Madea Goes to Jail is based on), but in the movie world she was introduced as a secondary role in Diary of a Mad Black Woman. So, now she belongs in that small club of supporting characters who’ve earned their own film(s); other members of which include Jay and Silent Bob, Bruce and Lloyd, Cousin Eddie, Marshal Samuel Gerard, the Scorpion King and Wolverine.
And Madea is one of the very few female characters to belong to the club, which is another good reason for an actress to scold Perry. But the problem also lies with the people who write woman characters, apparently, since in coming up with ten other supporting characters who deserve their own spin off, we managed to only include two females on our list. Perhaps if we’d permitted classic film characters there’d be more to choose from — though even then we might be more likely to include a Peter Lorre or a William Demarest role than a Thelma Ritter or Eve Arden.
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It usually takes a comedic franchise a few outings to warm to up a “going to jail” installment. Sure, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay got the irrepressible stoners to America’s most infamous detention center on their second journey to the multiplexes, but for the most part, especially when the films are buoyed by a comedic performer whose brand is based around a single outrageous, larger than life comedic persona, you have to work up to the jailhouse installment.
Tyler Perry’s sixth outing as a feature film director, Madea Goes to Jail, which opens today (not screened for critics), takes him into this territory as he sends his signature character to the slammer, but the most treasured entry in this oh so small subgenre certainly belongs to John Cherry III. Who the hell is John Cherry III? He directed 1990’s Ernest Goes to Jail, the fourth proper theatrical film to feature the late Kentucky-born comedian Jim Varney’s Ernest P. Worrell, the insatiably stupid blue hat and vest-wearing bank janitor who would go on to be the subject of Trauth dairy milk commercials and an increasingly inept series of movies that bottomed out with 1997’s straight-to-video Ernest Goes to Africa.
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