Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

The_Film_Cricket It may be somewhat by design that I'm a little late to the cult of Tyler Perry and by extension to the mysteriously popular fatuous imbecile that inspires him to put on a dress and a grey wig. Either you get on board with this Madea character or you don't. Personally, I don't. I find the character irritating; an outdated stereotype that sets the course of African-Americans back at least three quarters of a century. I know it sounds like I'm being a stick in the mud, but seriously, every time I see this character I feel the need to be anywhere else. She's annoying, a filter-less motor-mouthed battle-axe somewhere in her 70s who perpetually dresses in muumuus and spouts ignorance one minute and biblical platitudes the next.Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas is my second exposure to this character after the bizarrely ham-fisted I Can Do Bad All By Myself. Both films, to be honest, are a chore to sit through if you aren't in love with Perry's alter ego. While Christmas is slightly better than the previous film, but that's basically comparing ointment to suppository – take a look at my rating. What comes to light in this film, and in last year's laughably clumsy melodrama Tyler Perry's Temptations: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor is how inept Perry is as a filmmaker.I'm not kidding, A Madea Christmas is so badly shot and so poorly edited that for a time I wondered if I was watching a rough cut of the film. There are moments when characters move out of the frame and the cameraman doesn't know what to do, so he simply zooms in on the actor left on the screen. There are moments during dialogue scenes that the camera focuses on a character who isn't talking and clearly the actor doesn't know he/she is being filmed. There are scenes and dialogue that simply stop as if the actors are signaling for another take.Not that the story of Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas would have been any better with improved production values. This is a moronic film. It opens with an insufferable comic set-piece that finds Madea working with her great-niece Eileen (Anna-Maria Horsford) in a department store dressed as Santa Claus. I could say that shenanigans ensue except that while the idea of having Madea work customer service would seem to be a perfect comic opportunity for the character, the scene lasts five minutes before she is abruptly dismissed for opening her big mouth.That idea dropped, the plot quickly moves to a country town where Madea travels with Eileen to visit her daughter. Her daughter Lacey (Tika Sumpter) doesn't want her mother to visit for Christmas because she's hiding the fact that she's engaged to a white man named Connor (Eric Lively). Ho HO! What could come of that is developed in a really offensive subplot in which Eileen becomes convinced that Lacey's fiancé and her parents (Kathy Najimy and Larry the Cable Guy) are members of the Klan. Why? Well, she walked in on her parents while the father had a bedsheet over his head. Yeah! It's also so we can have a lot of speechifying about race relations and getting along, which Tyler Perry delivers in every move with a sledge hammer.The rest of the plot involves the town, a farming community, that has hit hard times ever since a dam was built by an evil and thoughtless corporation. They're main struggle in the movie is to have an annual jubilee that somehow will keep the town from going under financially. I'm not exactly sure how the jubilee is suppose to help, or why the farmers are harvesting their crops in December. I'm also not sure why Tanner (Chad Michael Murray), one of the neighboring farmers who lives close to Connor, insist that he not grow corn since he himself grows corn despite the fact that Connor has developed a way to grow corn without water. I may not know so much about farming, but I never thought it was a problem for two farmers to grow the same crop.This is an illustration of a long list of things that – based on the films he makes – that he doesn't know about. In I Can Do Bad All By Myself, it becomes clear that he has a misunderstanding of how not only AA works but how child protective services works. In Temptation, it becomes clear that he has a misunderstanding of how the business world works and how therapy works. Here, it becomes clear that he has a misunderstanding of how agriculture works and how small local governments work. I don't know if it's just him if he thinks his audience won't notice. Rarely have I ever seen a filmmaker who has less respect for his audience's basic understanding of the world.

Hot 888 Mama . . . and going undercover to expose crime and racism in the American South. Though the switch from comedy to docudrama in TYLER PERRY'S A MADEA CHR!STMAS may go against Mr. Perry's forte, he is to be commended for this public service contribution to the citizenry of the U.S. In CHR!STMAS, we see how there are still as many Ku Kluxers as bed sheets in the South. We see a Black family (Eileen and Lacey) struggle to overcome decades of heartbreak after racist Dad has "moved on up" to a White woman. We see how a White man pretends to be a farmer (though he can't tell a bull apart from a milk cow) working on a new "corn syrup" formula, when it is obvious the main reason he married school teacher Lacey was to provide himself with "cover" for his Meth Lab operations. We also are warned that Ford pick-up trucks are liable to crash and burn for no reason at all, and we are shown the necessity for "brushing" away any evergreens planted too close to homes in wildfire country. Perry further exposes the conspiracy to steal Christ out of Christmas, and suggests that the American crime rate can be lowered by a return to crucifixion. The Madea writer\producer\director also lobbies for minimum wage workers to use any means necessary to obtain a "living salary" from their employers, even if it means raiding the till. The main "takeaways" from CHR!STMSAS: be suspicious of EVERYONE, and never sacrifice a "teaching moment" on the altar of humor.

carzellako04 While Witness Protection was a slight deviation in quality from Perry's previous films, I saw this one to give him another chance. This movie was awful! I think Perry touched on interesting subject matter in terms of the relationship between the two main characters and the class and race issues which surrounded them. Madea had about two or three funny lines throughout the movie which can be seen in the movie previews. However, the acting was terrible,the storyline dragged and parts of it seemed completely implausible. Who would believe that a "city girl" from Atlanta ends up living on a farm in rural Alabama and still walks around in 5 inch heels on a farm. The random phone call from her ex which started the movie also seemed unbelievable and caused the movie to get off to a very rocky and slow start. After wasting my time with this movie I think Perry should stop making Madea films. The formula is old and not working anymore. Don't waste your time seeing this.

tavm I've seen some Medea movies but this was the first time I've watched one in a movie theatre. I watched it with my movie theatre-working friend but since he was on call for a possible shift today, we saw it at a cinema for a competitor which meant we both paid admission. Anyway, there was plenty of laughter from the audience including my friend but I, myself, only chuckled during Medea's attempts at his department store job but by the time the scene changed to Alabama and the arrival of Larry the Cable Guy, I laughed plenty especially whenever he had dialogue with the Tyler Perry woman character! There's the putting-in-lessons about racism, a corporation's attempt to put "Christ" out of Christmas, and bullying to stew the pot to contrived effect though because it's meant to go down easy for about 90 minutes, one probably won't get too offended. Anyway, Tyler Perry's A Medea Christmas is indeed pretty entertaining especially if you watched TV during the '80s and liked recognizing Lisa "Blair Warner" Whelchel from "The Facts of Life" or Anna Maria "Thelma Frye" Horsford from "Amen" while viewing this...