I Can Do Bad All By Myself

Tyler Perry likes his melodrama broad and his comedy broader. In the insistently uplifting I Can Do Bad All by Myself, the former comes courtesy of April (Henson), a selfish boozehound nightclub singer who learns—predictably, and after musical numbers by Gladys Knight and Mary J. Blige—to do good via caring for her sister’s kids and renting a room to a hunky Colombian mechanic. The laughs, meanwhile, are delivered by cross-dressing Perry’s sassy grandma Madea, whose wild threats of violence to children and adults alike are the only things that sporadically lighten up this narratively and grammatically dim redemption pap.