Down to Earth
**
Cinema
Releases - June 8, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12. 87
minutes. Directed by Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz. Written by Louis CK, Lance
Crouthier, Ali LeRoi, Chris Rock; from the 1978 screenplay "Heaven Can Wait"
by Warren Beatty, Elaine May; based on the play by Harry Segall. Starring
Chris Rock, Regina King, Chazz Paliminteri, Eugene Levy, Frankie
Faison.
About halfway through "Down to
Earth", it is revealed that a butler played by Mark Addy is a guy
from New Jersey faking a British accent. But Addy himself is British, and
not very good at putting on accents, so his American voice sounds a helluva
lot more phoney than the British one.
Another oddity is that the film stars Chris Rock,
a terrific stand-up comedian, in the role of a bad stand-up comedian. We
see scenes of his agent desperately trying to encourage him, and of him
diligently writing material… but when he gets on stage, he delivers
tired jokes in a forced manner and the audience boos him off.
I mention all this to illustrate how "Down to
Earth" goes out of its way to avoid being funny. It backs actors into corners,
restricting them from using their natural talent. Addy is not always an
embarrassment -- he was wonderful as the alternately buoyant and bashful
fat guy in "The Full Monty". And Rock is an extraordinarily talented performer
(see his concert movie "Bring the Pain") -- but here he has no room to improvise
or loosen up, as Eddie Murphy did in "Beverly Hills Cop", or as Rock himself
did in "Lethal Weapon 4". He just uncomfortably delivers one meaningless
line after another -- although as he was one of the screenwriters, he must
bear some of the blame.
The plot is a reworking of the 1978 picture "Heaven
Can Wait", which was in turn based on a play by Harry Segall, which was also
adapted into the classic "Here Comes Mr. Jordan". Rock's character gets run
over by a truck, and is whisked off to heaven by his guardian angel a moment
before it hits. While sifting through the paperwork, the men upstairs discover
that this has all been a big mix-up, and it is Rock's destiny to live for
another forty years.
To square things, the skinny, black Rock is put
into the body of a man who has just died -- the first corpse available being
that of a fat, white millionaire named Charles Wellington. This sounds like
something potentially comic, but as this movie is so intent on avoiding comedy,
the screenplay does its best to sidestep common sense. While the joke is
that Rock is a hyperactive young black man inside an old white body, we the
viewers are shown Rock in his own body. What's the point?
Rock's general aura makes some of the picture
drift by smoothly, and I'm sure that if he found a good script, he could
be a decent movie actor. Here he looks uninspired, with
reason.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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