Summary
Tyler Perry’s Joe’s College Road Trip — to give it its full title — is a typically anarchic Madea movie, but don’t let that put you off. There’s a little more under the hood here than you might expect.
Tyler Perry’s Joe’s College Road Trip – to give it its full, self-aggrandising title – is not your average Madea movie. For one thing, Madea is barely in it. And for another, it’s actually pretty good, steadily morphing as it goes from a silly, anarchic comedy into what is basically Black History Karate Kid. I generally don’t like this franchise, and I’m on record repeatedly reiterating that Tyler Perry is a blight on good taste and decency, so believe me when I say, I’m as surprised as you are.
It helps that Joe is my favourite character in the Madea menagerie. The cantankerous ex-pimp brother of Madea and father of Brian, Perry’s relatively even-keel audience-surrogate member of the family, is always a riot, but I wasn’t sure he could necessarily shoulder his own movie. As it turns out, he makes the perfect foil for Brian’s sheltered, bourgeois Gen Z son, Brian Junior (Jermaine Harris).
The general idea here is that B.J. has grown up in the lily-white lap of luxury and hasn’t quite grasped the importance of Black culture and history, at least in part because Brian has kept him deliberately sheltered from it. But now his chickens are coming home to roost. B.J. is due to leave for college, and he wants to eschew the historically Black Morehouse in favour of Pepperdine, a private Christian research university in Malibu. But worse than that, he doesn’t really understand the need for HBCUs and thinks it’s high time Black people “got over” slavery.
Even to Brian, this seems like a problem, but it’s one without any easy solutions, especially since he’s loath to tell his kid what to do in a household where he has basically been coddled within an inch of his life. For reasons that he probably couldn’t articulate if you put a gun to his head, Brian takes Madea’s advice of allowing Joe to escort B.J. to college in his old Buick, the idea being that the cross-country road trip will teach him a thing or two about how the world looks outside of his pampered suburban bubble. And boy, does it.
Joe’s College Road Trip isn’t a subtle movie. B.J. is a very broad stereotype of bellyaching modern liberals – he’s vegan, environmentally conscious, and won’t stop babbling on about the patriarchy and toxic masculinity – whereas Joe is a very broad stereotype of a fossilised generation who can’t stand the kids these days and still think and act as they did in their heyday. But the two extremes have a middle-ground that could benefit both, and throughout the journey, which seems on the face of things like a string of incredibly ill-advised attempts for Joe to introduce B.J. to women, gambling, and the authentic Black experience, both characters can’t help but learn a thing or two from each other.
Let’s be clear – this is still a Madea movie in its bones, so it has the same anarchic, scattershot sense of humour, and if you don’t like the main series, you’ll still struggle here. But there’s also a whiff of sincerity, a strain of earnest anger and pride about the themes it’s discussing. There’s a moment where Joe confesses to B.J. how proud he has always been of Brian, despite never having said it to him, that is so earnest that it catches you unaware. The movie’s “big twist” – which you’ll see coming a mile away, admittedly – lands like gangbusters, lacing a silly movie with a point that it’s difficult to argue the importance of.
Perry’s always good as Joe, but this is his best take on the character for obvious reasons. But the real revelation might be Jermaine Harris, who sells B.J.’s naivete and aggravating moral superiority just right, keeping him fairly likable even when he’s supposed to be annoying. When Amber Reign Smith turns up as a sex worker on the run from violent gangsters, the two of them form a nice double-act that starts to dig into the logic behind Joe’s demented itinerary. For good measure, there’s even one of the best scenes of Black-on-white-supremacist violence since the first Kingsman movie.
Mileage may vary, obviously. As inexplicably popular as this franchise is, it’s also often deeply terrible, and it’s an acquired taste at the best of times. But if you can help it, don’t be too quick to dismiss Joe’s College Road Trip. You might learn something along the way.
