Joe's College Road Trip

The Weight of the Highway

I genuinely do not think Tyler Perry has much interest in tonal moderation. His movies usually live at one of two extremes: hushed earnest melodrama or full-volume slapstick bedlam. *Joe’s College Road Trip* refuses to pick a lane and just barrels ahead with both. Watching Perry step out of Madea's floral armor and fully inhabit the crusty, foul-mouthed Joe, you get the sense he is using this road trip to dump a lot of irritation about the modern world onto the screen. He is not subtle about any of it.



The setup is familiar enough, though already a little frayed. Joe has to drive his grandson B.J., a deeply sheltered and relentlessly progressive Gen Z kid played by Jermaine Harris with tight, anxious body language, on a college tour. B.J. wants Pepperdine. He argues that Historically Black Colleges belong to the past, that the culture should simply "heal and move on." Joe hears that and responds the only way Joe can: by hauling him through the deep South, with stops at the Lorraine Motel and the site of Emmett Till's murder. The contrast is wild. One minute Joe is firing off R-rated misogynistic one-liners that sound imported from a 1990s comedy club, and the next the camera is lingering on the Memphis balcony where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. *Blu-ray.com* critic Brian Orndorf said the film "mixes rough comedy with insincere messages on black history," and I part ways with him on *insincere*. Clumsy, yes. Heavy-handed, absolutely. But Perry's urge to make younger people stare directly at the blood in the soil feels frantic and messy rather than false.



The motel sequence says a lot. Joe, guided by a moral code that has no relationship to polite society, hires a local sex worker named Destiny (Amber Reign Smith) for his teenage grandson. At first it looks like the setup for the cheapest kind of teen sex comedy, and I was bracing for disaster. Then B.J. and Destiny are left alone, and the scene suddenly finds another register. Smith grounds it. She never turns Destiny into a cartoon; her posture loosens, her voice drops, and the scene becomes about survival instead of punchlines. Harris, whose early work on Disney projects mostly had him playing bright-eyed optimists, visibly collapses inward here. You can watch the exact second his neat academic worldview collides with another person's lived reality. He stops gesturing. He stops performing certainty. He just listens.



Whether any of this tonal high-wire act works for you will depend almost entirely on your tolerance for Perry's brand of cinematic whiplash. By the third act, the movie has somehow wandered into a literal library shootout involving a local pimp, because Tyler Perry scripts apparently cannot conclude without someone pulling a gun. It wrecks some of the quiet, careful work the actors had managed an hour earlier.

Still, I can't dismiss the whole chaotic trip. *Variety*'s Owen Gleiberman was onto something when he wrote that there is "an extraordinary spontaneity to it." This thing feels less like a polished studio package than a family barbecue argument that got out of hand: loud, inconsistent, exasperating, but driven by a very real need to be heard before the chance disappears.