With his best cast ever, topped by Oscar winner Kathy Bates and the great Alfre Woodard, and his most cinematically polished production to date, "Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys" shows grand advances in the filmmaking education of playwright-turned-filmmaker Tyler Perry. It's also his soapiest film yet, an overwrought melodrama of sibling rivalry, infidelity, family business power plays and terminal illness.

Woodard and Bates are Atlanta matriarchs, single mothers and longtime friends. Alice (Woodard) runs a diner where she's raised the money to send spoiled daughter Andrea (Sanaa Lathan) to college, something other daughter Pam (Taraji P. Henson) resents.

Charlotte (Bates) is a construction mogul content to keep her spoiled son (Cole Hauser) under her thumb at the family business.

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'Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys'

2 stars = Mediocre
Ratings explained

• Starring: Alfre Woodard, Kathy Bates
• Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, sexual references and brief violence.
• Web site: familythatpreysmovie.com

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How close are the families? We meet them on Andrea's wedding day, which takes place at Charlotte's expense and in Charlotte's vast antebellum mansion. This really is the New South.

Cut to four years later, and Andrea and her husband are both working in Charlotte Cartwright's construction firm, with Andrea now successful and resentful of a man she's grown ashamed of. There are troubles in the younger Cartwright's marriage, too.

And the business has been invaded by a corporate infighter, too-broadly played by Robin Givens.

And with all these stresses, all Charlotte wants to do is convince Alice to be Louise to her Thelma for a road trip in a classic Cadillac convertible she's bought. Yes, if you saw "Bonneville" or "The Bucket List," that's going to sound familiar.

It's a film of soap-opera close-ups capturing the fabulous grooming and makeup of the gorgeous cast, of immaculate sets that don't look lived in, of B-unit road trip shots of the Seven Mile Bridge, the Grand Canyon and the French Quarter. There's a lot of church in here, a choir number, a baptism "out West" plainly filmed in the Georgia mud.

But everything that crosses the screen feels warmed over. Perry's success hinged on his tying together broad stock characters and generic situations with an Oprah-inspiring message slapped on top. All that's missing is the Madea ex machina, Perry's female impersonation of an Atlanta auntie who sasses and slaps everybody back to their senses in some of his comedies.