Joe's College Road Trip

The Unbearable Lightness of Joe

There is a moment in the second act of Tyler Perry’s *Joe’s College Road Trip* that unintentionally reveals the film’s entire philosophical struggle. Joe Simmons, the foul-mouthed patriarch played by Perry under layers of prosthetic latex, stands before a civil rights monument in Alabama. For a brief second, the camera lingers on his face—usually a landscape of leering cynicism—and finds something resembling reverence. But then, the moment snaps. The silence is broken by a joke about irritable bowel syndrome or a lustful comment directed at a passing tourist. This whip-lash tonal shift is the defining texture of Perry’s 2026 entry into the "Madeaverse," a film that attempts to marry the weight of generational trauma with the buoyancy of a scatological road comedy.



The premise is deceptively simple, echoing the structures of *Green Book* or *National Lampoon*, but filtered through Perry’s specific brand of moral didacticism. Brian (Perry, out of makeup) fears his son B.J. (Jermaine Harris) has become too sheltered by their upper-middle-class privilege. His solution is an erratic one: send the boy on a cross-country college tour with his grandfather, Joe. The objective is for B.J. to learn "Black history" and "how the world really works," though one suspects the real lesson is simply endurance.

Visually, the film suffers from the glossy, flat lighting that has plagued Perry’s Netflix era—a "sitcom cinema" aesthetic where every room looks like a showroom and every outdoor location feels strangely hermetic. However, Perry as a director does make an interesting choice in the confines of the vehicle. The interior car shots are claustrophobic, forcing the two generations into a shared frame that neither wants to inhabit. It is here, in the forced proximity of the passenger seat, that the film finds its rhythm. The passing American landscape becomes a blur of history that Joe interprets through a lens of paranoia and survivalism, while B.J. views it with the naive optimism of the digital age.



The heart of the film relies entirely on the chemistry between Harris and Perry. Jermaine Harris brings a necessary grounding to B.J., playing the straight man with a weary patience that mirrors the audience's own. But this is Joe’s movie. By elevating a character who was designed as a side-dish of comic relief to the main course, Perry takes a significant risk. Joe is a character defined by his lack of filter and his refusal to evolve. In previous films, he was the Greek chorus of bad advice; here, he is asked to be a sage.

The conflict arises when the script tries to redeem Joe’s toxicity without actually changing him. We are asked to accept his harassment and cruelty as "hard-earned wisdom" simply because he has survived a harder era. The film posits that his jagged edges are necessary armor, yet it often revels in the sharpness of that armor rather than the tragedy of why he had to wear it. The narrative collapses under its own ambition when it tries to pivot from a slapstick sequence involving a fraternity prank gone wrong to a somber monologue about Jim Crow. The bridge between these two tones isn't just unfinished; it was never built.



Ultimately, *Joe’s College Road Trip* is a fascinating artifact of a creator wrestling with his own legacy. Perry seems to want to say something profound about the distance between the generation that fought for a seat at the table and the generation that grew up assuming the seat was theirs. Yet, he cannot resist the urge to pull the chair out from under them for a cheap laugh. It is a film that demands we respect the elders, even while it caricatures them. We are left with a road trip that covers thousands of miles, yet somehow, emotionally, ends up exactly where it started.