Filmmaker Tyler Perry always begins his movies with the best of intentions. He presents tales of good, honest, hard-working people trying to overcome adversity in an unforgiving world. But all to often he  weighs down his stories with one-dimensional characters, heavy-handed morals, and the most contrived plot devices imaginable. Meet the Browns is merely the latest such film, one shooting for the moon as a heartwarming drama but instead getting dashed to cinema's thematic rocks.

Meet the Browns centers on Brenda Brown (Angela Bassett), a single mom struggling to make ends meet in Chicago. With three kids in her care, Brenda barely manages to get by, and her situation worsens once she loses her job. But just when it seems things couldn't get any worse, she receives a letter about her estranged father's death and summoning her to rural Georgia for the funeral and reading of the will. There, Brenda becomes acquainted with her colorful extended clan, from the dim but exhuberant Leroy (David Mann) to catty gossip queen Vera (Jenifer Lewis). In addition to getting to know the family she never knew, Brenda starts to lower her guard, softening her hardened exterior and opening up to the vast generosity offered  not only by the Brown clan but also by a kindly basketball coach (Rick Fox). 

As with all Tyler Perry productions, Meet the Browns unfolds with all the dramatic grace of a rhino on  rollerskates. None of the film's very emotional moments can arrive with the slightest hint of subtlety; they all have to be hammered into the back of our minds, as if we couldn't understand a message like "Dealing drugs is bad." Perry means well, and much of his popularity comes from his willingness to bring these issues to the surface instead of skirting around them. But the way he goes about it seems insulting to one's intelligence. Plus most of the dramatic situations he presents serve no purpose in the plot; they arrive to generate a few brief moments of phony tension, then they're gone as quickly as they're introduced. Without such sequences, Meet the Browns probably would've been about 30 minutes long.

Meet the Browns carries on another Tyler Perry tradition, that of utterly wasting the talents of a rather fine cast. For my money, Angela Bassett is one of the finest actresses working today, and I thanked the cinema gods for every moment she was in the film. She tries her darndest to elevate the painfully melodramatic material, and although she occasionally gets caught being screechy like many of her fellow cast members, she still remains a treat to watch at least once in a while. I can't say the same for Fox, whose performance comes across flat as a pancake (a basketball player playing a basketball coach -- what a stretch); Lewis, who's as irritating as they come; or Mann, whose humor comes at the expense of his character being a complete nimrod. However, I'm not as keen to blame the actors as I am to finger the script as the culprit, for it's the hamfisted drama that forces the cast members to overplay their roles to the hilt.

I'm waiting patiently for the day a Tyler Perry movie moves me with its heartfelt characters and impresses me with its delicate storytelling. Meet the Browns indicates that Perry has yet to learn from his mistakes. Perhaps he never will. 

MY RATING: * (out of ****)

(Released by Lionsgate and rated "PG-13" for drug content, language including sexual references, thematic elements and brief violence.)