Joe's College Road Trip: A Squandered Teachable Moment That Is Still Better Than It Has Any Right to B

I promised myself I would not do it again. And then, because I love Black people and I want to see Black people win, I did it again. I watched a Tyler Perry film. So here we are.

If you are unfamiliar with Tyler Perry, the short version is this: he got his start on the church play circuit in the late 1990s and early 2000s, building an audience out of working-class Black churchgoers who finally felt seen on a stage. I watched nearly every one of those plays in college. My church community gathered around them the way other communities gather around sporting events. There was solidarity in it. When Perry eventually made his transition to cinema, a lot of us were genuinely rooting for him, because he was the rare example of someone who had built something entirely from nothing, sleeping in his car, educating himself, pulling himself up without a roadmap. That goodwill has been wearing thin for a while now, but it has not entirely evaporated, which is probably why I keep coming back.

Joe's College Road Trip is a Netflix original built around the character of Joe, Mabel Simmons's foul-mouthed, third-grade-educated, formerly pimping brother, who has spent roughly two decades on the periphery of the Madea universe without demonstrating a single moment of meaningful personal growth. When Brian, his attorney son, needs someone to take his grandson BJ on a college road trip, Madea volunteers Joe for the job. BJ has been offered spots at both Pepperdine and Morehouse, and is leaning heavily toward Pepperdine, where his two white friends are headed. The goal of the trip, at least in theory, is to reconnect BJ with his Blackness and steer him toward the HBCU. In practice, the trip involves a stop at a brothel, a glory hole scene that should have been left on the cutting room floor entirely, and a Confederate flag encounter played mostly for laughs.

And yet. There is something in here worth talking about.

The film's most genuinely interesting thread involves a young woman named Destiny, played by Amber Rain Smith, who you may recognize from Beauty in Black. She is essentially a trafficking victim trying to escape the life she has been pulled into, and she ends up on the road with BJ for a stretch of the trip. What she does during that time is quietly remarkable: she photographs every historical landmark they visit along the way and, near the film's end, walks BJ through what each of those stops actually meant. The Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and which has been preserved as a monument to that moment. Sites connected to the history of Black music, Black resistance, Black survival. It is a genuinely moving sequence, and it points toward the film this could have been.

That is the central frustration with Joe's College Road Trip, and honestly with Tyler Perry's work more broadly at this stage. The bones of something meaningful are almost always present. The message here, that you have to know where you came from in order to know where you are going, is a good one. The instinct to route a road trip through landmarks of Black American history is a good one. But the execution buries the meaning under so much noise that the audience barely has time to feel the weight of what they are seeing before the film moves on. Joe takes BJ to these places without telling him why they matter. Destiny has to speedrun through the history at the end in a montage that will mean everything to a viewer who already knows the significance of each location and almost nothing to the viewer who does not. That second viewer, the 13-year-old who has never heard of the Lorraine Hotel, is precisely who this film needed to reach most, and it lets them slip right through its hands.

It is a structural problem, but it is also a writing problem. Perry has never fully trusted his audience to sit with something, to let a moment land before the next joke arrives. The comparison I keep returning to is Friday. That film is genuinely funny, laugh-out-loud funny, and it also knows when to slow down and let its characters be human. The scenes between Ice Cube and John Witherspoon, between Ice Cube and Anna Maria Horsford, carry real emotional weight precisely because the humor steps back to make room for them. Perry has never quite learned that lesson, and the result here is that the few scenes that do carry some gravity, a quiet conversation in a hotel room, Destiny walking BJ through the photographs, get crowded out before they can breathe.

The rating situation for this film is also worth noting. Perry has been drifting away from his family-oriented brand for years now, but the Madea franchise in particular carried a specific promise to a specific audience. This film opens with what appears to be an AI-generated disclaimer montage warning viewers about the language and content ahead, which tells you everything about the distance we have traveled from the church play days. I do not object to adult content in adult films. What I object to is the missed opportunity. The story of a young Black man trying to figure out who he is and where he belongs, set against a road trip through the geography of Black American history, should have been something a family could sit down and watch together. Something a parent could use to open a conversation with a 12-year-old who is starting to think about the future. Instead it is rated for adults and priced accordingly, and the audience that needed it most cannot get in the door.

There were moments when I laughed. The banter between Joe, Brian, and Madea has a lived-in quality that the rest of the film lacks. Amber Rain Smith brings a warmth and intelligence to Destiny that the script does not fully deserve. And Jermaine Harris, who plays BJ, holds his own in the scenes he shares with her.

This is not Perry's worst Netflix film. It is better than Straw, which felt like a blender full of other people's ideas forced toward an emotional manipulation it had not earned. It is better than Madea's Family Reunion, which felt less like a film and more like a paid vacation for Perry's inner circle. It does not reach the artistry of Diary of a Mad Black Woman, For Colored Girls, or Jazzman's Blues, the three films that represent what Perry is actually capable of when he slows down enough to care about craft. But it tries, at least intermittently, and trying counts for something.

The thing that stays with me is Destiny. There is a version of this film where she ends up at Spelman while BJ enrolls at Morehouse, where her arc gets the resolution it deserves, where the girl who gave him his education gets one of her own. That film would have been something. This one gestures toward it and then drives past without stopping.

A C-plus. Better than it had any right to be, and a long way from what it should have been.

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Shaquanna "Quanna" Stevens is a film critic, educator, and storyteller who reviews films through the lens of culture, representation, and genre. She runs Her Reel Review, where she explores horror, romance, fantasy, and films by Black creators. When she's not writing or filming reviews, she teaches English IV Honors and AP Literature, advises student filmmakers, and helps young creatives develop their voices.