Madea's Witness Protection

After reading the other user reviews here on IMDb, I had low expectations walking into the theater today.... Did we watch the same movie?!

The movie starts out slow and beats a few jokes to death with excessive sarcasm and a convoluted concocted storyline. Definitely a film directed towards a non-white audience; it busted on all the white stereotypes, particularly the 'greedy wall street banker' and 'obliviously ignorant racist' ones. In a theater of 75 people, I was the only white person - awesome! I have no problem laughing at myself and knew it was going to be a fun movie with an interactive audience - and I was not disappointed :-)

With the previous Madea movies, the story tends to be more of a romance/drama, with Madea thrown in for some comic relief and wisdom. I was pleased to see that this was intended to be a straight-up comedy. Some parts of the movie flow more smoothly than others, the jokes are nothing new, and the story line is nothing ground-breaking, but it succeeds in pulling off a lot of slapstick humor... ultimately a raucous comedy that the crowd was hooting, hollering and giving hearty laughter. Like most things in NYC, the people are half the fun - being the only whitey in the room made it all the more authentic :-)

If you're looking for a thought-provoking, nuanced, 'fresh' movie, this isn't it. If you're looking for some good laughs and 2 hours of entertainment, come and see it!

Stay for the outtakes at the end credits - they are some of the funniest scenes :-)

I sat down in 2021 to watch the 2012 movie "Madea's Witness Protection". Now, I was vaguely familiar with the Madea movies in general, having seen a single one I think, so I wasn't really completely sure what I was getting into here.

However, I will say that writer and director Tyler Perry did manage to produce a script, storyline and movie that was fun enough for what it turned out to be. "Madea's Witness Protection" is the type of movie that you will watch once, and probably never again, as the contents of the storyline just didn't strike me as it was having enough to it to support more than a single viewing.

I suppose it takes a certain kind of humor to fully get into a movie such as "Madea's Witness Protection". But for me personally, there was only so much of a man pretending to be a woman that could be seen before it started to grow stale. I mean, it has been done and seen before in movies such as the 2007 movie "Norbit" or the numerous "Big Momma's House", and others. So it wasn't as if Tyler Perry was inventing anything grand here with this 2012 movie.

The movie definitely is carried by a rather impressive cast list, with the likes of Tyler Perry, Eugene Levy, Denise Richards, Tom Arnold, Doris Roberts and John Amos on the billing.

There was a fair amount of comedy throughout the course of the movie, and that definitely helped to keep the movie afloat a great long way.

I was adequately entertained by "Madea's Witness Protection", but this was hardly an outstanding gem in the comedy genre. Nor is it a movie that I think I will ever be returning to watch a second time.

My rating of "Madea's Witness Protection" lands on a five out of ten stars.

I'm not going to regurgitate the premise of this movie as many others have. I will say that if you don't like TP and/or Medea, why the heck did you watch this movie. It was a typical Madea movie. Silly, OTT, nonsensical etc. But to fans of Perry, it was just plain mindless funny. We're you expecting fine theater based on classic literature? It's beginning to be obvious, based on all the reviews of all his movies that there's a significant amount of bigotry coming from TP's community. What a shame.

I went and saw this last night with family and friends and really enjoyed myself. Yes, I can hear everyone moaning about "Its the same crap over and over again", which I agree is kinda true, and honestly, if you don't like the Madea movies, you might not like this one either, even though I do think this was one of the better ones (never did like "Madea goes to Jail").

Yes, Medea can get pretty tiring, after all, how many times can you see a 6ft+ man in drag? I know I had gotten tired of it pretty fast with "Big Momma's House". But there is just something about Madea that screams "homicidal maniac" and its hilarious watching "her" trying to stop from bitch slapping these people. As for the movie itself, some of the dialogue was a bit infantile and some of the acting a bit over the top (and under in some cases), but I came to watch a funny movie and not an intellectual one, so I let those slide.

As for Tyler Perry, I love most of his movies. See, I didn't saw I loved them all, cause I do agree that a lot of his story lines are becoming very similar and almost one-dimensional (although I did enjoy the last one "Good Deeds" very much).

Keep rocking Tyler!!

Tyler Perry took the film industry by storm when he introduced Madea in his first film Diary of a Man Black Woman. The stories were always filled with comedy, but surrounded by an emotional story that made them so much more. Over time, the idea stayed intact, but Madea has stepped more into the forefront and they have been losing their serious side. With the latest Madea's Witness Protection it seemed to be another with more comedy than drama, but with an all-new twist taking this story outside the norm with the introduction of a white family into Madea's world.

Madea's Witness Protection follows an investment banker who is caught up in a Ponzi scheme to take the fall for the Wall Street firm he works for. In exchange for a lighter sentence he decides to work with the District Attorney's office and is put into witness protection in the home of Madea, the District Attorneys aunt. This is probably one of the weakest of all the Perry movies to date. While it's not horrible, it has almost completely lost all of the dramatic aspect that made these movies so effective. There are a few aspects for this family to grow, but it's played up more on the comedy side instead of the usually powerful drama. The cast is fine with the direction of the film, but really the only truly funny moments are that of Madea and Joe both played by Perry himself. They are the kind of characters that if you like them are really funny if you don't then the entire film falls flat. The story is fine even though the reasoning for them being there is a bit far-fetched, but if you can let that go the movie is pretty fun.

In the bigger picture you are either a Perry fan or not. If you like his films then you will enjoy this one despite the lack of the drama; if you don't then you will most likely not see it anyway. The Madea character is one that has become one of those characters that fans love and others are annoyed by. No matter what you feel of the character or these films you cannot deny Perry's ability as a filmmaker and his creativity on bringing her back to the big screen. This is probably not her last appearance, but let's hope he heads back to his roots to find the passion and drama to team up with the comedy to deliver another powerful movie like the one that started it all.