Like Martin Lawrence’s two previous Big Momma capers, Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son was not screened in advance for critics. Those who dutifully caught the movie were therefore forced to stand in line and buy tickets like everyone else on Friday. And some may have wished that they could have spent their Friday night doing something else. Indeed critic Roz Laws, who writes for the Birmingham Post in the U.K., where the film also opened, wrote that the 107-minute-long movie was “107 minutes too long.” She then added, “Please let this be the last film. I can’t take any more Big Mommas.” Critics on this side of the Atlantic echoed that groan, together making Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son hands down the worst-reviewed movie of 2011. Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times concluded that it is simply manufactured schlock — “a lifeless piece of pure product, slapped together with haphazard disregard for comedy, storytelling and filmmaking.” Several critics suggested that Lawrence only made this threequel because he saw the success Tyler Perry has had with his Madea character. Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel commented that Lawrence appears “trapped in the one persona that still pays the bills. And that character isn’t funny anymore.” Bruce DeMara in the Toronto Star imagined a time in the future when some alien civilization discovers artifacts that caused the ruination of our civilization — artifacts including Lawrence’s film, which “despite its highly negative reception by the entertainment critic-erati … still achieved a sizable economic return for its producers.” But Mike Hale in the New York Times, while describing the movie as a “schlocky family comedy,” does find one adjective to bestow on it that is not totally derogatory. The adjective is “amiable.”
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