Movie review: Tyler Perry does it again - unfortunately - in 'Meet the Browns'

Tyler Perry's fans know enough to stay through the closing credits of his latest, "Meet the Browns." The ending is filled with outtakes that give away the movie's real purpose, to launch his friend and collaborator David Mann (star of Perry's TV show, "House of Payne") into movie stardom.

And that's the sole purpose of "Browns," a holding-pattern movie for a filmmaker whose skills and ambition seemed to be growing, movie by movie, even if the films all fit the same pandering, female-empowerment formula. Whatever progress the man was making, "Browns" is a big step backward.

It's a sloppy, slapdash dramedy based on Perry's play (and video of that play) of the same title.

Angela Bassett is Brenda, a single mom struggling to survive in Chicago. She has three kids by three daddies. The oldest, Michael (Lance Gross), could be a basketball star, if only his no-good father would help Brenda make the rent and keep the electricity on.

Then Brenda gets the news that the daddy she never knew has died in Georgia. A relative has sent her bus tickets. The bulk of the movie is Brenda fighting to keep a job, to keep her son out of the drug trade, to avoid the courtship of a handsome coach (ex-L.A. Laker Rick Fox, more model than actor) and generally delay the trip to Georgia that the darned movie is about.

That's where she runs into the leisure-suit-wearing Leroy (Mann), a guy given to praising Jesus, spouting malapropisms ("helicropter") and high-voiced one-liners ("Don't go gospel gangster on her, baby").

Some in the family welcome this "sister" their "pimp" daddy never told them about. But Vera (Jenifer Lewis) is all up in Brenda's business. She claws her way into scenes, mugs shamelessly and never plays a line when she can overplay it.

It's great that Perry always works messages into his plays and movies, and Brenda gets a nice speech about the dead end for kids who rely on sports as a way up in the world. Perry always leaves the race card off the table, with a nearly equal share of black and white villains and sympathetic figures.

When Perry shoehorns in an unexplained, unmotivated and absurd police chase with Madea (the grandmotherly character Perry plays in drag) solely to promote his next film, September's "Madea Goes to Jail," you can't help but wish he'd hire somebody else to polish his mediocre scripts before he films them. And you hope that someday he'll care less about his "Tyler Perry" brand, pandering to his base audience and padding his bank account.