Eddie Murphy falls flat in new comedy film Thousand words, FEW LAUGHS

March 10, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Eddie Murphy finds inner peace — but precious few laughs — in “A Thousand Words,” an ambitious new comedy from a guy whose ambition abandoned him sometime in the 1990s.

Unlike your average Eddie-as- Daddy farce, this one has heart, genuinely emotional moments and a message. But the veteran funnyman lets us see the panic in his eyes as he mugs all manner of faces, sings and croons his own sound effects in an effort not to speak, not to use up the last thousand words he has before he dies.

Murphy plays Jack McCall, a dapper Hollywood literary agent with the trophy job, the trophy car, the trophy house high on a ridge, and a trophy wife (Kerry Washington) and child, to boot. He owes it all to his manic patter, his ability to bluster his way through any deal.

“Learn to speak your mind, but do it QUICKLY,” he tells his assistant/prot g (Clark Duke). “I can talk anybody into doing ANYTHING.”

His latest coup? Signing a wildly popular New Age guru whose book is sure to be a global best-seller. But Dr. Sinja — played as an unnerving blend of Deepak Chopra and Werner Herzog calm by Cliff Curtis — isn’t an easy sell. Jack is a raging sea of flattery, bull and little white lies dashing up against Dr. Sinja’s placid and immovable rocky shore. Jack makes his deal but offends a Bodhi tree in Sinja’s compound. The tree magically pops up in Jack’s yard, and with every utterance, it loses leaves. When it’s out of leaves, Jack is out of time. He will die.

“It seems like all your talking is making you sick,” the inscrutable Sinja counsels.

Sinja isn’t written as a villain. “Our words have a profound rippling effect on the whole universe,” he says. “In quiet, there is truth.”

Jack, Sinja teaches, is making his last journey, learning that one big life lesson. He’d better make his peace with his lifestyle, his unhappy wife and his mom who has Alzheimer’s, played by Ruby Dee in a performance so real and heartfelt that she shakes the whole movie up around her.

Screenwriter Steve Koren gave us “Bruce Almighty” and “Evan Almighty,” so he’s going to get the mystical/spiritual side of the movie right. But he and director Brian Robbins (“Meet Dave,” “Norbit”) completely botch the set-up. Jack doesn’t earn this fate. Maybe Murphy rubbed what little edge the guy had off to make him “nice,” but talking fast and playing loose with the truth hardly seem like death-by-Bodhi tree offenses.

The early acts should play broad and funny, but Murphy’s efforts at Starbucks charades (he has to pantomime his order at the notoriously complicated coffeehouse), at resisting business conversations that will save his job, as resisting his wife when she pleads “Talk DIRTY to me, Jack!,” all fall flat. Without the words to go along with his bug-eyed double-takes and the mugging, Murphy is lost here.