A THOUSAND WORDS (Brian Robbins). 91 minutes. Opens Friday (March 9). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: N
Eddie Murphy’s latest farce is a feature-length game of charades I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch.
Murphy plays a Jack, a boorish, fast-talking literary agent who treats his assistant (Clark Duke) like a slave and ignores his pretty wife (Kerry Washington) and infant son. When he smooth-talks a Deepak Chopra-like spiritual guru named Dr. Sinja (Cliff Curtis) into a book deal, he suddenly finds his life intertwined with that of a mysterious Bodhi tree. Each word he speaks – or writes – results in a fallen leaf, and presumably when the branches are completely bare he will die.
This silly premise takes eons to set up, long enough for us to hate Jack and roll our eyes at his obvious shortcomings – insincerity, selfishness, greed – which we know will all be reversed by the final reel.
Most of the intended laughs come in the middle section, where Jack, trying to save his remaining leaves, resorts to hand and body signals to communicate. In one of the few bearable scenes, he rounds up his office’s collection of talking dolls to carry on a conference call.
Thanks to a weak script and Brian Robbins’s direction, the film lurches from broad comedy to bathos. Duke (TV’s Greek) has a scene or two where he gets to shine, and Ruby Dee almost steals the picture as Jack’s forgetful old mother.
But Murphy never seems comfortable (that desperation in his eyes may be anxiety about his floundering career), and Allison Janney and Washington are wasted in thankless roles.
