Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family

Writer-director Tyler Perry goes to the Madea well once too often and comes up dry. (Please, Lionsgate, don’t make him do it again!) The worn-out formula is the same: Comic scenes of Perry in fat-lady drag punctuating a fevered soap opera with loudly squabbling cardboard characters (half of whom you want to slap all the way into next week), culminating in Madea sitting them all down for a motormouthed talking-to, after which everybody cries and apologizes and makes up. As usual, there’s a fine cast (Loretta Devine, Shad “Bow Wow” Moss, Rodney Perry, Isaiah Mustafa, etc.), but they have nothing to play this time but, well, Tyler Perry clichés. With last year’s For Colored Girls, the Atlanta auteur showed what he could do; he’s earned the right to put this exhausted series to rest and do it again.