HOLY MAN (Touchstone) Starring: Eddie Murphy, Jeff Goldblum, Kelly Preston, Robert Loggia, Jon Cryer. Screenplay: Tom Shulman. Producers: Roger Birnbaum and Stephen Herek. Director: Stephen Herek. MPAA Rating: PG (profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 113 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
One of the things you've gotta love about Hollywood marketing people is their occasional bouts with irony deficiency. If you trusted television advertisements for HOLY MAN, you'd probably suspect that it was a raucous Eddie Murphy comedy where the star spends most of the film mocking and deflating uptight media types. That's because Touchstone Pictures' marketing department knew it'd have one hellacious time trying to sell HOLY MAN for what it really is: a somber, sincere satire-cum-cautionary tale in which Eddie Murphy, despite his lead billing, generally plays second fiddle to Jeff Goldblum.
The wonderful, awful irony comes from the "message" of HOLY MAN. Goldblum plays Ricky Hayman, the programming director for Miami-based Good Buy Shopping Network. Faced with lagging sales at the network and mounting personal debt, Ricky realizes he has to do something to turn things around fast. Fate intervenes when Ricky and colleague Kate Newell (Kelly Preston) nearly run over an apparently homeless man calling himself "G" (Murphy). A few plot contrivances later, G wanders onto the Good Buy set and on the air, becoming an instant phenomenon by lending his New Age philosophizing to the hawking of chainsaws and electronic beauty aids. As G's success reinvigorates Ricky's career, Ricky begins to wonder whether it's more important to be honest with people than to use any means available to sell to them.
Pretty good gag, huh? Only the joke will be on viewers who expect to have their funny bones tickled, but instead get a nearly two-hour lecture on the evils of consumerism. And what an achingly strident lecture at that, with Goldblum twitching and furrowing his brow every few seconds to make sure we understand he's in the middle of a Jerry Maguire-sized crisis of conscience, caught between Preston as the angel on one shoulder and Robert Loggia as the devilish network boss on the other. Murphy, meanwhile, gets a few devilish moments of his own -- you know, the ones in the commercials -- but essentially spends the film's running time smiling beatifically and waxing profound on the importance of love and connection with the earth. It's all very well-intentioned, and deadly dull.
The sad part is that HOLY MAN could have been an effective piece of satire. The script by Tom Schulman presents G as a latter-day Howard Beale or Chance the Gardener unknowingly tapping into some zeitgeist malaise. Unfortunately, if you're going to go for NETWORK or BEING THERE-style stabs at modern media, you need someone a bit more cutting edge at the helm than Stephen Herek (THE MIGHTY DUCKS, MR. HOLLAND'S OPUS, 101 DALMATIANS), Disney's crowd-pleaser-in-residence. Herek wraps everything in a warm-n-fuzzy package guaranteed not to offend, a pointless perspective for a social satire. Even the few token pokes at infomercialism, including cameo pitch-meisters like Morgan Fairchild, Betty White and Soupy Sales, are too feather-light to amount to much. Wasting a chance to savage as ripe a target as home shopping should be a criminal offense.
It's similarly criminal wasting the presence of Eddie Murphy. I understand Murphy's recent move toward kinder, gentler, family-friendly roles, since there are only so many ways to play the wise-cracking rebel with the honking laugh. The problem isn't his performance in HOLY MAN, which is quite adequate for the minimal work he's actually required to do. The problem is that no matter how hard Murphy tries to be a "versatile actor," he's going to be in trouble with audiences if marketing geniuses keep suckering his fans into watching a Murphy they don't really care to see. I'm glad Murphy felt strongly enough about HOLY MAN's message of integrity to take a chance playing against type, but he could have picked a less tedious vehicle. It's even worse when Touchstone makes him look like a certain Pot referring to a certain Kettle's ebony shading.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 guru'ed awakenings: 4.
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