Why Did I Get Married Too (2010)

Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too has singlehandedly changed my mind about movie audience participation. I have, up until now, always been the kind of moviegoer for whom silence is golden. I abhor Sing Along Sound of Music and my one outing to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show made me want to crawl out of my skin.

But the exclamations of “Oh, no, girl” and “Damn, he’s fine” from the sold-out seats all around me were the very best part of seeing this film, although I seriously doubt that was Mr. Perry’s intention when he cobbled together his melodramatic buppie (that’s Black Yuppie) soap opera.

The awkwardly named sequel–second in clumsiness only to I Still Know What You Did Last Summer–picks up four years after the initial film. Four couples go on a retreat to the Bahamas to renew their friendship and their romances by publicly proclaiming why they got married. These include Terry (Perry), a stay-at-home dad and his lawyer wife Diane (Sharon Leal); Patricia (Janet Jackson), a psychiatrist, whose own bottled-up emotions could use some purging, and her longsuffering architect husband, Gavin (Malik Yoba); Angela (Tasha Smith), the loudmouthed nag and her henpecked husband Marcus (Michael Jai White); and Sheila (Jill Scott), recently remarried to Troy (Lammam Rucker) after getting a divorce from her abusive investment banker ex, Mike (Richard T. Jones). Instead of bringing them closer together, the retreat uncovers cracks in the foundation of each of the marriages until all of the couples hover on the brink of divorce–or murder in over-the-top Angela’s case.

The participatory experience was particularly comforting in the first, ostensibly comic, half of the film. These initial 40 minutes weren’t actually all that funny. The lone exceptions are Angela and Marcus, who let it all hang out. Smith steals the show with her top-of-lungs screaming and near-slapstick physicality as Angela. And Perry’s scripting of an idiosyncratic tick in Marcus’ speech (he says “Nah’mean” whenever he’s lying) is actually pretty amusing to watch. The rest of his humor writing–a mix of clichéd one-liners about love, sex, and marriage–were either indolently dependent on the audience’s knowledge of the first film or simply landed with a thud.

To his credit, Perry does know his mostly female audience well: the scenes in the Bahamas deliver tons of shirtless moments from the muscled male cast. And yes, they are fine.

The all-talk-and-no-action melodrama that takes over in the second half of Why Did I Get Married Too reveals another chink in Perry’s armor. He writes screenplays as though he’s still writing stage plays, where his career began. The actors hold forth in long, dull soliloquies about their feelings that would do much better acted out physically. After all, juicy actor’s nuggets like suspicion, guilt, hidden illness, and the pain of losing a child are all on the table.

Perry seems to forget that in his new medium, he can use the camera (he also serves as the director) to focus the audience’s attention on even the subtlest signifiers, choosing instead to charge full steam ahead to the patently obvious. Even though the production values are high–neither Atlanta nor the Caribbean has ever looked so glossy and pristine–his camera work where it really counts is ho-hum, at best.

I wish I had such high praise for the shoddy editing. There are some odd costume changes that make it hard to tell if there’s an error in continuity or the ladies think they’re hosting an awards show. Worse than that, the film cuts back and forth between each of the couples’ respective at-home tempests almost nonsensically. A prime example is a scene where all of the ladies head to Patricia’s house to comfort her, looking strangely clean and calm in spite of the crazy (let’s just say actual bullets fly) days they’ve each had themselves.

Naturally, where there’s melodramatic storytelling, there’s overacting…in this case, from Jackson. She shakes, cries, and is inexplicably wet-haired through the entire second half of the movie. A scene where she redecorates her glass house with her husband’s golf clubs was a great opportunity for her to show off the acting skills she did in 1993’s Poetic Justice, granting catharsis to both her character and the keyed-up audience. Unfortunately, her performance is so histrionic and overblown, I couldn’t help but thinking of her late brother’s windshield smashing, crotch-grabbing music video. Cries from the audience included “who’s bad?” “shaa-mawn,” and “hee-hee” in Michael’s signature falsetto. Now, that’s what I call cathartic.

Mockery aside, it seemed that Why Did I Get Married Too remained on its audience’s good side until a shocking car crash forced the film to an abrupt, trite ending of hugs all around. I think a lady in the third row summed it up best: “Aw, hell no.”

(For more Tyler Perry films, be sure to check out Amazon. We receive a small commission for sending you their direction, but it helps us keep the doors open. I’m certain Madea would like that.)