After a high-speed car chase, Madea (Tyler Perry) winds up behind bars because her quick temper gets the best of her. Meanwhile, Assistant District Attorney Josh Hardaway (Derek Luke) lands a case that's too personal to handle: that of a young prostitute and former drug addict named Candace (Keshia Knight Pulliam). When Candace winds up in jail, Madea takes the young woman under her protective wing in Tyler Perry's Madea Goes To Jail. 
Well, it's about time. With the exception of a brief tease in "Meet the Browns," it's been three years since moviegoers last saw Madea, the dress-wearing alter ego of writer/director/actor Tyler Perry--and she has been missed. You may not even realize how much until you see her on screen again, bigger than life and happily wreaking havoc. Adapting his own play, Perry has pared the plot way back while giving his law-breaking matriarch more room to run free. She does briefly, and amusingly, wind up behind bars, but it's just another setting in which she can create chaos. (At one point, she proves herself the only woman able to leave Dr. Phil speechless.) Though he plays two other roles, Perry only really cuts loose when he dons Madea's housecoat, turning her into a devilishly funny voice of reason. Likewise, the movie tenses up when she's offscreen, becoming the sort of moralistic soap opera we've seen from Perry before. This time, Derek Luke plays Josh, a sensitive assistant DA engaged to Linda (Ion Overman), a selfish colleague. At the movie's start, he's shocked to discover he knows his latest client—a heroin-addicted prostitute named Candy (Keshia Knight Pulliam). Josh is determined to help Candy however he can, much to Linda's outrage. She considers Candy an unredeemable lowlife, and incidentally far too attractive to be sleeping on her fiancé's couch. Luke fills out his sketchily-drawn character, but Pulliam makes a thoroughly unconvincing hooker--and not just because we still see her as "The Cosby Show's" little Rudy. Like Angela Bassett in "Meet the Browns," she's simply too graceful to sell her gritty role. And she's not helped by Perry's typically broad screenplay, which adds no nuance to her tear-jerking scenes. Even Madea rolls her eyes at one point, upon hearing the umpteenth sob story. "Good Lord," she sighs, "do I have to listen to this melodrama?" Those who ignore her—Perry included—do so at their own peril. Tyler Perry’s cantankerous matriarch, Madea, continues to roll over anybody who crosses her path in the actor-director’s latest turn in elderly drag. But as in the franchise’s earlier films, the sharp-tongued senior serves as mere comedic fodder for the Christian-fable-like plot. The predictable, even absurd twists that the movie takes to reach its happily-ever-after conclusion are amusing, as are the smart-ass quips and disposition of Perry’s popular alter ego. The film is unabashedly escapist entertainment, and its namesake is none the wiser nor repentant by the end of it. For that matter, neither are we. Crowd-pleasing African-American filmmaker Tyler Perry has been heralded as an entrepreneur, a populist, and an expert on the wants of female audiences, but none of that would have happened if he weren't also an expert drag performer. Mabel "Madea" Simmons, the crazed Atlanta matriarch of his family sagas Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea's Family Reunion, and this enjoyable comedy, is quicker on the uptake than any of Eddie Murphy's fat ladies, quicker even than Flip Wilson's Geraldine Jones. Also good for a few laughs is her white-haired boyfriend, Joe (also played by Perry), a hopeless pothead who attaches the ventilator tube from his oxygen tank to his bong. Like all Perry's movies to include Madea (southern for "mother dear"), Madea Goes to Jail interweaves the heroine's antics with a melodramatic subplot, this one especially well acted by Derek Luke, as an attorney trying to save an old friend (Pulliam) from a life of prostitution, and Viola Davis, as a straight-talking prison minister. An hilarious 4 on my "Go See" scale.
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