Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too?

There's a strange disconnect between the movie Why Did I Get Married Too? (a sequel to Tyler Perry's 2007 hit film) thinks it is, and the movie it actually is. It seems to think it's a wise, eye-opening film about love and relationships. In reality, it's an overblown, crude, live action cartoon that shoots itself in the foot so many times, you start to think that Perry (who not only produced, wrote, and directed the film, but stars in it as well) was attempting to sabotage his own movie.

To be fair, the movie starts out being tolerable enough. It's not great or even good by any stretch of the imagination, but the first 45 minutes or so don't offend. These moments concern four different married couples (all of them best friends with each other) who go on a yearly couples getaway vacation. We learn early on that all of them have their own problems that they bring with them. Patricia (Janet Jackson) is a self-help author who seems to have a perfect relationship with her husband, Gavin (Malik Yoba). However, telltale signs of heated arguments behind closed doors hint at something else. Sheila (Jill Scott) is recovering from a bad relationship with her abusive ex, and hopes for a fresh start with her new husband, Troy (Lamman Rucker), who is struggling with unemployment. Things become awkward when her ex-husband, Mike (Richard T. Jones), shows up at the resort uninvited. Meanwhile, Diane (Sharon Leaf) and her husband Terry (Tyler Perry) seem to be happy, but Terry suspects his wife is unfaithful. Angela (Tasha Smith) thinks that her husband Marcus (Michael Jai White) is unfaithful too, and goes to extremes to try to get him to fess up, and give her access to his cellphone, so she can check all his calls and messages.

The character of Angela is the first big misstep the movie makes. She's loud, she's crass, and she's annoying to the point that we don't only wonder why Marcus stays with her, but we wonder what he sees in her in the first place. He mentions that the sex is good, but no sex, no matter how good, is worth the constant humiliation that Angela puts him through. She embarrasses him publicly every chance she gets, refuses to believe a word he says, and even goes so far as to humiliate him at his own job, where he works as an anchorman for a local sports talk TV show. When she suspects him of cheating on her, she barges in on his TV show while it's being filmed live, and chews him out. The scene is supposed to be played for laughs, but Tasha Smith is so shrill and abrasive, she made my skin crawl. Why does she think he's cheating? Because the elderly snoop who lives next door to them claims to have heard sexual sounds coming from their bedroom in the afternoon when no one's supposed to be home. Angela comes home one afternoon, hears someone making love upstairs, and grabs a loaded pistol from a closet door. She bursts into the room, fires multiple rounds into the wall and floor while she screams at her husband, only to find not Marcus in bed, but their hired gardener and his girlfriend.

This is the kind of stuff that holds Why Did I Get Married Too back from being the movie it wants to be. It keeps on throwing scenes so contrived and unnatural at us, it reaches the point where we can't even picture these characters as being rational human beings anymore. I don't care how angry or how certain Angela is that her husband is cheating, there is no logical explanation for her to just start shooting blindly at whoever is in their bed. When she discovers it's not her husband in bed, she doesn't seem to care, and even chases the two lovers out of her house, shooting at them the entire time. I was waiting for the scene where Marcus comes home, sees his bedroom and hallway riddled with bullet holes, and asks what happened. It never comes. Oh, he does come home, but the gunfire is never mentioned, and the two apologize and make up. It's supposed to be a happy ending for the two, but all I could think about was the safety of the two children she shares with her husband, given her violent and extreme mood swings that she constantly displays.

The other couples and their problems are not handled much better. In fact, the movie becomes increasingly silly to the point that we want to cry Uncle. Almost every conversation in the movie becomes a high-pitched shouting match at some point, showing that Perry has no confidence in his own material. He doesn't let his couples work things out like intelligent individuals. They scream, they smash and break stuff, they throw tantrums, and they don't get to exhibit anything that could be considered a genuine human emotion. Subtlety has never been a strong suit of Tyler Perry's past films, but here, he goes for broke and comes up empty handed. There's not a single moment here that's not contrived, manipulated to a ludicrous degree, or hollow. There's also a total lack of a dramatic arc, with Perry's screenplay throwing in crises and plot developments seemingly at random.

Is there anything here worth recommending? Well, the surprise cameo during the last 10 seconds is kind of fun, but you have to sit through an absolutely awful climax to get there. It's not worth it, overall. In fact, nothing about this movie is worth the trouble of the cast or the crew. This movie ends up being a giant waste of time for everyone involved, and the audience watching it.

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