IMDb plot summary: After stretching the truth on a deal with a spiritual guru, literary agent Jack McCall finds a Bodhi tree on his property. Its appearance holds a valuable lesson on the consequences of every word he speaks.
Directed by Brian Robbins. Starring Eddie Murphy, Kerry Washington, Clark Duke, and Cliff Curtis.
A Thousand Words is a 2012 comedy starring Eddie Murphy, in which he plays a fast-talking publishing agent who inexplicably has his life force linked with a mysterious tree. Every word he speaks causes a leaf to fall, and, his guru advises him, when the last leaf falls, he'll probably die. Yeah, it's a pretty tenuous plot, but it does falls right within the established movie trope where a work-obsessed jerk has a supernatural thing happen to him that makes him a better person. This is no Groundhog Day or Liar Liar, though, as the loss of his voice offers very few laughs. Murphy's giving it his all in his elaborate games of charades, but the characters around him are written so stupidly that none of it works. If you're going to write a film relying this heavily on physical comedy, you've got to have the right set-ups, and this had none of them. The film's sentimental finale, in which he must let go of his past anger to be released from the tree, did remind me that Murphy is a surprisingly charismatic dramatic actor, even in cheesy nonsense like this. Not painful so much as wildly unambitious, but still not worth the watch.
How it entered my Flickchart:
A Thousand Words < The Road
A Thousand Words < The Life of David Gale
A Thousand Words < Armageddon
A Thousand Words > Dangerous
A Thousand Words > Spy Kids
A Thousand Words > Maurice
A Thousand Words > Shock Treatment
A Thousand Words > My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
A Thousand Words > Devil's Knot
A Thousand Words > Iron Man 2
A Thousand Words < Candleshoe
Final spot: #2797 out of 3193, or 12%.
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