This isn’t a movie: it’s a buffet at which writer-director Tyler Perry (Diary of a Mad Black Woman) piles your plate with spoonfuls of absurd melodrama, a taste of gritty urban drama, a heaping of cheap cartoon, and a big side of corn. Angela Bassett’s (Akeelah and the Bee) struggling single mom hauls her kids from Chicago to rural Georgia for the funeral of the father she never met, where she makes friends with a dreamy basketball coach (Rick Fox: Holes) who thinks her teenager son could play pro (as long as he can stay away from the allure of the street drug trade!) and sticks around to fall madly in love with her, too; and she is subjected to a parade of caricatures of siblings -- the fat stupid one; the bitchy catty one; etc -- she’s never known who come complete with their own cartoon theme music. Wild inconsistency among the characters and preposterous coincindence are on the blatantly calculated menu, too. For dessert there’s one pointless scene featuring Perry’s signature character Madea -- ie, Perry in a fat old-lady suit. You don’t need to save room: it’ll be forced down your gullet.

(Technorati tags: Tyler Perry, Meet the Browns, Angela Bassett)