HOLY MAN (Touchstone) Directed by Stephen Herek
"Holy Man" commits an unpardonable sin.
It offers up Eddie Murphy in his most endearing characterization in years, then keeps him on the sidelines for what seems like ages. Forget the placement of his name above the title; as he was in the infamous "Best Defense," Murphy should have been billed in this picture as "Strategic Guest Star."
He's also the only conceivable reason for anyone to sit through "Holy Man," an otherwise cardboard comedy which spends far too much of its running time giving us updates on the budding love affair between ambitious TV producer Ricky (Jeff Goldblum, behaving like Woody Allen after a few doses of Ecstacy) and media analyst Kate (Kelly Preston, whose stiff and charmless performance guarantees she'll continue to be identified primarily for her real-life role as Mrs. John Travolta). This will please the dozen or so people nationwide who came to see Goldblum do his standard yammering and yelping and will greatly frustrate the rest of us who'd rather watch Murphy skewer the home-shopping craze.
"Holy Man" takes place in the high-pressure Good Buy Shopping Network, where hard-up celebrities desperately try to unload useless merchandise -- Betty White pitches an aphrodisiac perfume called Clam, James Brown shills for the Soul Survivor System, etc. Ricky's job is on the line after 27 consecutive months of unimpressive sales; Kate is hunting for someone who can give the channel an identity.
Their prayers are answered when the enigmatic, soul-searching wanderer G (Murphy) crashes the studio, letting viewers know the truth about the lousy products GBSN touts; typical of their wares is an in-toilet bidet called Lil' Squirt which dispenses "a refreshing kiss of mist" to the derriere. G quickly becomes "the biggest thing to hit home-shopping since the cubic zirconium," although why customers would purchase any of this junk after G has shown its worthlessness is one of the many questions left unansw ered by Tom Schulman's half-baked screenplay.
There's a terrific movie to be made about home-shopping and the folks addicted to it, but "Holy Man" is not that film. Murphy's interactions with GBSN salespeople like Florence Henderson are truly funny, and his encounter with a terminally vain Morgan Fairchild would be hilarious had we not seen it in the film's commercials.
Unfortunately Schulman decided to make these satiric swipes a subplot, and the Murphy-less scenes with Kate and Ricky seem to drone on interminably. Goldblum is irritatingly manic while Preston seems utterly hollow; her smiles look like someone slapped a pair of wax lips on her face. The only notable directorial touch provided by Stephen Herek is the ending of every third or fourth scene with a long fade to black, which will make programmers happy when "Holy Man" debuts on TV a couple of years from now.
After a serious career lull in the first half of the '90s, Murphy seems unsure of his ability to carry a picture, playing second fiddle to wise-cracking animals in "Doctor Dolittle" and hiding behind special-effects in "The Nutty Professor." His winning performance here suggests it's time to drop that modesty and take control of his projects again. Certainly "Holy Man" would be infinitely easier to sit through if it had larger helpings of its supposed star; how sadly fitting a movie that warns against believing in advertising turns out to have been promoted deceptively. James Sanford
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