‘Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy’ Review – Prime Video’s Christmas Rom-Com Commits A Terrible Sin

Five days into November, and I’m not only reviewing my second premature Christmas movie of the year, but weirdly enough, the second one with “Joy” in the title. Unlike Hulu’s Joy to the World, though, which was essentially a Hallmark movie on a different platform, Prime Video’s Finding Joy comes from the sometimes demented mind of Tyler Perry, so it has loftier ambitions. Not too lofty — it’s still about a woman named Joy unexpectedly finding love over the holidays in fancifully comedic circumstances — but enough that if you were to DNA test this movie, you’d find the same worrying genome that characterises Perry’s generally execrable streaming thrillers.

If nothing else, though, Finding Joy operates in the rom-com territory that Perry is visibly more comfortable in. When it tries to be funny, it sometimes does a half-decent job of that. But its main problem is that it doesn’t try to be funny often enough, and never in that overblown, costumed way that can paper over many cracks in a script. Too much of this movie is left to languish in reality, and reality is something that Perry isn’t very good at simulating. His characters almost never talk, think, or act like real people, which isn’t as much of a problem when his characters are just him dressed up as a woman, but is pretty starkly highlighted in something like Finding Joy, which, for a large stretch of its runtime, is essentially a chamber piece.

I should explain. The titular Joy (Shannon Thornton, P-Valley) is a designer languishing in a thankless fashion industry and struggling in love. She thinks she might have found it with Colton (Aaron O’Connell, a stalwart of rubbish Christmas movies), who invites her to stay with his family in Colorado so that he can ask her a serious question. She assumes it might be a proposal, or at the very least a formalization of their relationship. But she’s wildly wrong. Colton is already engaged and is officially asking Joy to be his “best girl” at his wedding to Heather (Natalie O’Connell, Aaron’s real-life wife).

Naturally, Joy is pretty heartbroken about this, and decides the best course of action is to try to drive home in the middle of a storm, which results in her falling through a frozen lake and happening to be rescued by Ridge (Tosin Morohunfola), a sexy outdoorsman who lives in a hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere, totally off the grid. Joy isn’t suited to living off the land, and Ridge isn’t a great conversationalist, so their initial interactions are a little stilted. But eventually they start warming up to each other, literally and otherwise. From this, you can predict the entire movie, including the ending; the only surprise it yields is how seriously it takes itself. 

Sure, there’s some fish-out-of-water comedy in the cabin, and Joy has a couple of comic relief best friends whom we occasionally cut back to so we can keep track of their efforts to find Joy during the week she spends in rural isolation. But for the most part, the movie is a protracted conversation between Joy and Ridge as they work through their own deeply-held traumas and unachieved ambitions on the way to a laughably sincere connection that ends up playing out like several years of their life condensed into the span of a few days.

None of this really works. Thornton and Morohunfola have decent chemistry, but weirdly enough, that’s part of the problem, since their initial hostility seems forced and their bellyaching about how unlucky in love they are doesn’t ring true. There’s a bit where Ridge describes Joy as beautiful, and she acts utterly confounded by it, but Shannon Thornton is extremely beautiful, which she can’t have gone through her entire life without noticing. It all just feels deeply inauthentic.

Sometimes it looks inauthentic, too. These movies are churned out on the cheap and at considerable speed, which you can tell from the first-draft quality of the scripts and the tiny sets. A couple of times Finding Joy cuts to an exterior shot of the hunting cabin in the middle of a snowfall that looks sprung to life from PS2-era computer graphics, and it’s just symptomatic of the lack of care that characterises the whole thing. Be under no illusions here — Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy is about two very good-looking people falling for each other. Any feints in the direction of meaningful sentiments about the vacuousness of the fashion industry or the value of a rural lifestyle are set dressing for a deeply cliched and simplistic romance.

But none of this is the worst part. The worst part is that it’s boring. It’s boring in its pacing and structure, in its predictability, and in its muddled outcomes. It’s boring visually and thematically. It isn’t about anything. It doesn’t have a point of view. It’s empty and facile, not to make a clever point about fashion, but because it isn’t interested in being anything else. And that puts it in a weird position even within Tyler Perry’s cursed oeuvre. Finding Joy might not be his worst, his most incompetent or ridiculous movie, but it’s one of his most by-the-numbers and charmless. And that’s pretty unforgivable.