HOLY MAN

• Starring Eddie Murphy, Jeff Goldblum and Kelly Preston
• Directed by Stephen Herek
• Rated PG with profanity and adult themes; running time 114 minutes
• With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a 3

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(Oct. 9, 1998) -- Here's a warning to anyone who has seen the trailer or commercial for Eddie Murphy's Holy Man and thought (as I did), "Gee, that looks like it could be kind of funny."

Wrong, wrong and wrong. Here is yet another case where every possible comic moment from the movie has been stolen and inserted into the preview.

The result: Holy Man -- in which Murphy plays a new-age guru who becomes a home-shopping-network star -- has approximately one minute of funny material and 113 minutes that you have to sit through to find those laughs, which are doled out in 10-and 15-second increments.

Holy Man was written by Tom Schulman, author of the wrongfully Oscar-winning Dead Poets Society and the slightly less lauded 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag. It was directed by Stephen Herek, whose oeuvre includes The Mighty Ducks and Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead. In other words, we're not dealing with comedy giants here.

Murphy is a comedy giant but, unfortunately, he's put himself at the mercy of hacks. Murphy can't be funny in a vacuum, but that's what he's been given to work with.

So, for that matter, has Jeff Goldblum, who has most of the film's funniest lines and reactions. He, too, is left to flail in the witless and self-serious Schulman script. Director Herek's idea of ending a scene is to simply fade out when the actors stop talking.

Goldblum plays Ricky Hayman, a fast-talking, conscience-free executive at the Miami-based Good Buy Shopping Network (GBSN). Ricky is in trouble; his sales have been flat for 27 straight months, perhaps because he's trying to sell things such as doormats with rotating seasonal themes.

To reverse that trend, he has two weeks and a new marketing genius, Kate Newell (Kelly Preston), to help him. But Ricky, who is mortgaged and car-loaned up to his eyeballs, has no idea what to do.

A flat tire brings him into contact with G (Eddie Murphy), a kaftan-wearing, wisdom-spouting seeker who seems truly blessed with a gift to talk to anyone -- even the cynical, manipulative Ricky. Through a series of accidents, G wanders into camera range at GBSN and starts talking to the on-air pitch-people. Before anyone knows what's going on, he's started to sell tons of merchandise.

Suddenly Ricky is the genius of GBSN, and G is its biggest star. At which point Schulman apparently forgot about trying to make anything of the plot beyond a feel-good spiel that could just as easily be found on a bumper-sticker and summarized as "Stop and smell the roses." How profound.

What's even more profound is the waste of talent in evidence here. Murphy is at his most beatific; the audience waits and waits for him to explode in a comic riff, but it is never forthcoming. All we get is the sincere Eddie, preaching about the joys of getting in touch with yada yada yada. Murphy is like a punch line waiting for a set-up that never comes.

Goldblum hasn't played this kind of neurotic snake in a while, and the sparks seem to jump from his fingertips when he's racing through his lines early in the film. He and Murphy have a deliciously tense comic chemistry, with Murphy as the perpetual trickster and Goldblum as the perpetual square, waiting for the other comedy shoe to drop. It never does.