In “Joe’s College Road Trip,” Tyler Perry doesn’t just let his hair down, he isn’t just having down-and-dirty fun — he’s rambunctiously, wildly profane. The movie is a rude and rollicking lark, which makes it an anomaly in the Perry canon; even the Madea films are attached to some earnest swatches of domestic soap opera. But “Joe’s College Road Trip” is built around a character who makes Madea, in her hectoring brashness, look prim and responsible. That would be Madea’s brother, Joseph “KP” Simmons, a long-standing member of the Perry stock company of old-school cranks (he’s played, as always, under pounds of makeup, by Perry himself).
The film opens with a mock 1950s educational documentary that’s basically a satirical trigger warning. Joe, as the mock doc informs us, was born in 1937 and is 89 years old. “He is what one might call an endangered Negro species.” Joe was once a pimp, and we’re told that in the movie we’re about to see, he uses the word “motherfucker” 76 times, the N-word 74 times, and “throws in an occasional ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ at random, for good measure.” And so, the narrator concludes, “If you’re sensitive to these types of words, you might want to turn to more wholesome programming.”
Joe more than lives up to that billing. It’s not just the words, it’s the attitude — the way he believes in those words and delivers them with a pimp’s lack of mercy. Joe, with his thatchy white hair and eyebrows and mustache, eyes peering from behind tortoise-shell glasses, barks out every line in the voice of an ancient street hustler. You can feel how he’s linked, in spirit, to characters like Richard Pryor’s Mudbone or some of Eddie Murphy’s pricklier impersonations in “Norbit” and the “Nutty Professor” films. But Perry, tapping back into his Chitlin’ Circuit roots, pushes all of this a notch further. His Joe is a creaky old man who’s an anarchic, hellbent hooligan. He’s irascible, nearly sociopathic in his lack of concern for anyone but himself.
Yet that means that as a movie character, he possesses the courage of his own craziness. Perry’s performance is a spectacular piece of high-wire burlesque. There’s an extraordinary spontaneity to it. The outrages just keep spilling of him, to the point that you realize this is Tyler Perry’s id run wild. He never lets up, never softens the character, never backs down from Joe’s commitment to his mad-dog pimp’s vision of the world.
It’s the film’s inspiration to pair this proudly obscene and toxic old player with a teenage paragon of the new safe-space mentality — Joe’s grandson, B.J. (Jermaine Harris), a hyperintelligent supergeek who’s all restrictions and phobias and enlightened progressive oversensitivity. B.J. is a vegan, he takes a fistful of vitamins and antihistamines every day, and when he hears Leon Haywood’s 1975 slow-jam groove “I Want’a Do Something Freaky to You,” he says, “You think these are real lyrics? These are criminally sexist and misogynistic. Disgusting!” He sounds like a walking joke, but the key to Jermaine Harris’s canny performance is that he doesn’t condescend to the character or make him a cartoon. He’s a virtue-addicted Urkel played straight, and Harris shows you the inner anxiety — the quality that’s going to drive Joe nuts. There two, in mindset, seem so many generations apart that the movie could almost be a time-travel comedy. “I’m gonna kill yer daddy!” says Joe. “He’s responsible for this mutant ninja motherfucker I’m lookin’ at right here!”
B.J.’s daddy, Brian, also played by Perry, wants him to go to the venerable historically Black Morehouse College. But B.J. has been raised in what he sees as a post-racial world. (Joe’s going to set him straight on that.) His high-school pals are white, and he wants to go to Pepperdine University in Los Angeles. So it’s arranged, for no good reason beyond the essential requirement of a high-concept road-trip movie, that Joe will drive B.J. from Atlanta to California.
The two climb into Joe’s cherry-red 1970s Buick Electra 225 convertible and embark on a 1980s-style romp through the Deep South, replete with all the corn-dog road-trip plot twists you’d expect: clashes over analog-vs.-digital technology (Joe tosses B.J.’s cell phone out of the car and mocks his “Tik-taco” fixations), a visit to a brothel, a pit stop at a Confederate biker bar, where B.J. is so oblivious that he makes his way through the gray-bearded rednecks without registering that there might be any danger. (This is one of two scenes that leap into fantasy, as Joe beats everyone to a pulp with his walking cane, brandishing an attitude we might call Pimp Superhero as he does the crane kick in bullet time.) At the brothel, they stow away a sex worker named Destiny (Amber Reign Smith), so that Joe’s plan for B.J. to lose his virginity comes true, despite the kid’s initial fearful resistance. (He’s the one teenage movie virgin who wants to stay that way.) And, of course, there’s the moment when Joe and B.J.’s ongoing war becomes so explosive that Joe orders him to get out of the car in the middle of nowhere.
Joe’s pitiless quality does have its instructional aspect. He’s trying to show the overprivileged B.J. the world that Black Americans came from; his scandalous personality is encoded with the harshness of that history. But that just makes “Joe’s College Road Trip” a movie that has its educational piety and eats it too. The film’s real lesson is embedded in Tyler Perry’s performance, which says, “Look out! Whatever box you think I belong in, I’m going to bust right out of it.” He makes this cussed old crank hilariously free.
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