Tough World
By Cynthia Fuchs 

Monty (Idris Elba) is a good man. He’s hardworking, broad-shouldered, and affectionate toward his three young daughters, who turn giddy when he visits, proffering Pepperidge Farm treats and joyful hugs. His job down at Willie’s Garage doesn’t pay a whole lot, but he means to open his own auto shop some day, and so be able to keep his girls with him, rather than at his big-hearted ex-mother-in-law’s.

All this is set up in the first two minutes of Tyler Perry’s Daddy’s Little Girls. Yet another of Perry’s possessively titled, strenuously life-affirming melodramas, this film leaves out his broadest invention, the wildly popular drag character Madea. But it does rummage around in his usual themes and stereotypes, touching on some and hammering home others. Contrived and well-intentioned, the movie looks at the effects of class conflicts, single parenting, drugs, violence, and gang-bangers on regular folks in the neighborhood, located, here as in other Perry movies, in Atlanta.

Living in a one-bedroom walkup in the city’s Edgewood section, Monty is limited in what he can offer his girls, five-year-old China (China Anne McClain), seven-year-old Lauryn (Lauryn Alisa McClain), and 12-year-old Sierra (Sierra Aylina McClain). But when their grandmother (Juanita Jennings) dies, he brings them home and offers his own queen-sized bed, while he takes the couch. (Grandma coughs a couple of times, then informs Monty she’s got lung cancer as the camera reveals her array of prescription pill bottles and an ashtray half-filled with cigarette butts: somehow, Monty has heretofore missed these odious cues.)

At the funeral in the next scene, you meet Monty’s ex, the long-absent, excessively trashy Jenny (Tasha Smith). She arrives with a flurry of accusations (somehow, she wasn’t invited to her mama’s funeral) and wild gestures, determined to grab back her daughters just as they’re getting into Monty’s car. Supported gruffly by her live-in boyfriend, drug dealer and local menace Joe (Gary Sturgis), Jenny draws fire from her Aunt Rita (”You out whoring around all this time!”) but insists that she’ll get her daughters back: “We goin’ to court!” she promises, only because she wants to make Monty miserable, not because she actually wants her daughters.

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