A Thousand Words

In Tower Heist, Eddie Murphy seems energized and pumped and poised for a comeback. In A Thousand Words, the actor smashes all those hopes to bits. Forget it. The dream is dead.

The only reason this dumb, insulting movie won’t permanently derail Murphy’s career is that few people will ever be forced to sit through it outside of trans-Atlantic flights and interrogation rooms at Guantanamo Bay. Why has this gifted comedian repeatedly squandered his talents on such crummy pictures? Even Adam Sandler hasn’t amassed as many bad movies as Murphy has (Holy Man, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, The Haunted Mansion, Imagine That - the list is endless).

Maybe he just doesn’t read his scripts, much like his character of Jack McCall,a fast-talking literary agent who doesn’t read manuscripts. Jack just knows how to package books so they sell. The premise of A Thousand Words - which was written by Steve Koren, who also wrote the atrocious Jack and Jill, so you know what you’re in for - is that Jack must learn to be a better person after a bodhi tree sprouts in his backyard and loses a leaf with every word he says. When the tree’s branches are bare, Jack will keel over dead.

A Thousand Words was directed by Brian Robbins, who also worked with Murphy on Norbit and Meet Dave. Suddenly, those two movies feel like career highpoints. This is the kind of crass, soulless cash-grab that has Murphy holding a Starbucks coffee cup in front of the camera while saying the line “This coffee is incredible.” This is the kind of execrable picture that makes fun of a gardener who speaks in a ridiculous accent (“Dee sprinkler ees dead, but I feex eet!”) and has a running gag about an overweight gay man trolling a hotel for casual sex.

This is the kind of colossally misguided vanity project in which the story takes a melodramatic turn, exploits Ruby Dee as an old woman with Alzheimer’s, and concludes with a sequence in which Jack gets in touch with his inner child by chasing aboy through a field of wheat shot in golden, sun-kissed light. I am not making any of this up. Nicolas Cage served as a producer on A Thousand Words, which makes me wonder if he considered starring in the movie himself at some point. And yet Cage eventually passed, and he’s the guy who made Ghost Rider and The Wicker Man.

A Thousand Words was filmed in 2008 but wasn’t scheduled for release until now, in order to capitalize on Murphy’s anticipated gig as host of the Academy Awards. Except he bailed on the Oscars, and we got stuck with this insufferable movie. I wish I could erase A Thousand Words from my memory, because I suspect I will never be able to find Murphy funny again.

A movie this awful sears into your brain forever: It’s bad enough to scar. Beware.

A Thousand Words 67 Cast: Eddie Murphy, Kerry Washington, Cliff Curtis, Clark Duke, Allison Janney, Jack McBrayer, Ruby Dee Director: Brian Robbins Rated: PG-13, for language, sexual situations and adult themes Running time: 82 minutes