Witness

With Tyler Perry gradually segueing toward non-drag leading man status with Good Deeds and the upcoming James Patterson thriller Alex Cross, his latest appearance as the sassy, wisdom-dispensing matriarch of the title in Madea’s Witness Protection has an aura of fatigued reluctance to it, as does the film itself. Perry mentioned to Movieline that while he planned to keep with the character as long as there was demand from audiences, he “would be pretty good with passing it on,” and certainly in her franchise’s seventh installment Mabel Simmons, better known as Madea, seems ready to do the same, unable to summon the usual levels of outrageousness as she once again plays magical mender of other people’s problems.

In this case, those people are the Needleman family, who are forced to leave New York after George Needleman (Eugene Levy) gets set up as the fall guy after discovering his company has been operating on a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that’s resulted in the ripping off of multiple charities. The mafia is also somehow involved, and the case for whatever reason has to be tried in Atlanta — all contortions needed to land five wealthy white people in the house Madea shares with her brother Joe (Perry) after her nephew Brian (also Perry), who’s prosecuting the case, offers her $4,000 a month to keep them as part of a temporary witness protection arrangement.

By the time the film arrives at this setup — which it does laboriously, forcing Levy to struggle to carry the action for a good while by sputtering and acting flustered — you know exactly the type of humor that’s in store. The film dutifully works the cultural/class differences between the Simmonses and the Needlemans, with Madea referring to the morning routine of wife Kate (Denise Richards) as “yoda” instead of…