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Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds

TYLER PERRY’S GOOD DEEDS (Tyler Perry). 111 minutes. Opens Friday (February 24). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN


Good Deeds isn’t your typical Tyler Perry movie, even if the producer, writer, director and star has his name embedded in the title. Missing are the juvenile gags, the combustible, circus-like shouting matches (there are a few, but not as many as we’re used to) and Madea, Perry’s pistol-packing, smack-talking mammy alter-ego.

The director, who fashions himself a black Douglas Sirk, now seems bent on purging his movies of the racial caricatures that made him one of Hollywood’s top-paid entertainers. Good Deeds is his shot at being taken seriously, and as a result he’d ended up with a schmaltzy, joyless melodrama that lacks edge and loses its grip on his audience.

The bland Wesley Deeds (Perry), a CEO from a wealthy family, notices Thandie Newton’s janitor, Lindsey, who lives out of a minivan with her precocious six-year-old daughter. A sudden eviction makes her the ideal charity project to shake up Wesley’s miserably rich existence.

Newton turns in a ferocious performance, but even she can’t keep Good Deeds from being predictable and overly earnest.

Whether Perry’s trying to impress the critics who use him for target practice or elevate the taste of his audience, he’s betrayed those who expect him to be the well-meaning, politically incorrect entertainer he can be.

movies@nowtoronto.com

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