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'Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns'

1 star = Awful
Ratings explained

• Starring: Angela Bassett, Rick Fox, David Mann, Tyler Perry.
• Rating: PG-13 for drug content, language, including sexual references, and brief violence

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Tyler Perry's fans know enough to stay through the closing credits of his latest, "Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns." The ending is filled with outtakes that give away the movie's real purpose: to launch his friend and collaborator David Mann (star of many a Perry play and Perry's TV show, "House of Payne") into movie stardom. Whatever Mann doesn't get to do in his few scenes in the movie is more than made up for in the outtakes.

And that's the purpose of "Browns," a holding-pattern movie for a filmmaker whose skills and ambition seemed to be growing, even if his films all fit the same pandering, female-empowerment formula. Whatever progress the man was making, "Browns" is a Madea-sized big fat step backward. It's a sloppy slapdash dramedy based on Perry's play of the same title.

Angela Bassett is Brenda, a single mom struggling to survive in Chicago. She has three kids by three different daddies. Brenda gets the news that the daddy she never knew has died in Georgia. A relative has sent her bus tickets. The bulk of the movie is Brenda fighting to keep a job, to keep her son out of the drug trade, to avoid the courtship of a handsome coach (ex-L.A. Laker Rick Fox) and generally to delay the trip to Georgia. That's where she runs into the leisure-suit wearing Leroy (David Mann), a guy given to praising Jesus, spouting malapropisms ("helicropter") and high-voiced one-liners ("Don't go gospel gangster on her, baby").

Some of the family (characters played Margaret Avery of "The Color Purple," Frankie Faison) are welcoming to this "sister" their "pimp" daddy never told them about.

But Vera (Jenifer Lewis) is all up in Brenda's business, mouthing off, insulting her poverty and the like. If Smithfield hams ever looks for a spokeswoman, Lewis is their gal. She claws her way into scenes, mugs shamelessly, and never plays a line when she can overplay it.