Review: 'Down to Earth' scrapes Rock bottom in comedy

In this story: No time for death Thematic wandering RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Paul Tatara
CNN.com reviewer

(CNN) -- Chris Rock is an audacious, sometimes caustic stand-up comic. His recently disbanded HBO show has been one of the genuine highlights of cable TV for the past few years.

So you have to wonder what he was thinking when he cooked up "Down to Earth," an unbelievably lame remake of Warren Beatty's "Heaven Can Wait" (1978) -- which, in turn, was a remake of 1941's "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" -- that is exactly the kind of thing that Rock usually dismantles.

One would suspect that he's looking to become another Eddie Murphy, a movie star with a specifically African-American identity who's still able to ingratiate himself with white America. Murphy, however, is a real actor, not just a comedian with the power to get a movie made, and even he dies when the script is as lousy as the one Rock is working with.

And Rock's thespian technique doesn't help: It mainly consists of lifting and dropping his arms while he delivers lines.

No time for death

Rock "plays" Lance Barton, a struggling New York comic who, in the opening sequence, is shown bombing at Harlem's legendary Apollo Theater. This is as close to funny as the movie gets, because we see things from Lance's flop-sweat perspective. The audience is so ready to boo him into submission, a couple of women in the balcony actually gargle before they begin. That may not sound like much, but, in relation to the rest of the movie, it looks like a lost outtake from "Annie Hall."

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Lance, ever the go-getter, still believes in himself, even after the humiliation. It doesn't matter, though. That night, while riding his bike home from the performance, he gets run over by a truck.

Cut to heaven, which is basically a fancy restaurant full of beautiful women. A couple of angels in powder blue suits (Eugene Levy and Chazz Palminteri, both of whom are under-utilized), determine that Lance was inappropriately shipped to the afterlife. It's not his time to die yet, so his soul is allowed to return to earth and start over again, in someone else's body.

For reasons that aren't worth getting into, Lance winds up assuming the corpus of Charles Wellington, one of the richest men in America. Unfortunately, Wellington is a fat white guy who looks to be in his late 50s, and he's got a tacky trophy wife (Jennifer Coolidge) who hates him. To make matters worse, Lance is falling in love with Sontee (Regina King), a well-meaning black woman who's trying to force Wellington to allow underprivileged, uninsured patients into a Brooklyn hospital that his corporation owns.

Hilarity, to say the least, does not ensue.

Thematic wandering

Rock and his co-writers have no understanding of screenplay construction; the story isn't a story so much as it's a thematic wandering.

When he's doing stand-up (his own, not the intentionally awful kind delivered by Lance), Rock's satire can be startling. Here, he just marches out one tired situation after another in which an older white man makes people uncomfortable by acting like a young black man.

For instance, a tough-looking hip-hop guy punches Lance in the mouth because he thinks he's being mocked when Wellington starts rapping to the DMX tune that's blasting from a car stereo. Wellington's board of directors is also appalled when he tells the media that he's ready to let anyone into his hospital, regardless of whether or not they can pay their bills. Gasp-gasp, huff-huff, grumble-grumble.

The halting romance between Wellington and Sontee escalates, not that you believe it for a second. Their age, income, and race disparity is enough of an obstacle, but there's no chemistry at all between Rock and King. And the montage that's supposed to represent their being drawn together looks like the opening of "That Girl." They go on the requisite carriage ride through Central Park, but are forced to hold their noses because the horse smells bad. A sidewalk caricaturist draws a picture of them together, and Lance makes a face when he sees yet another representation of just how fat, white, and bald he really is. It's a wonder they don't drink from the same chocolate and vanilla milkshake with two straws.

There's no escaping the fact that this is a terrible picture, even if you're not expecting much. The best move at this point would be for Rock to reconvene his TV crew and start making vicious fun of himself.

If "Down to Earth" were any more mild, it could be sold as baby shampoo. There's just a bit of profanity, and a couple of benign drug references. This is directed by "American Pie"'s Chris and Paul Weitz, which is like getting two guys to lift a cheese doodle. Rated PG-13. 85 minutes.

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