Red Eye Reviews: A Thousand Words

[pyrostinger]

This movie was... alright, I guess.  Eddie Murphy plays a high-powered, fast-talking agent whose life is silently falling apart around him.  When he goes to secure a book deal from new age guru, not only is the book woefully inadequate for mass production, but a mysterious tree shows up in his back yard, losing leaves for every single word he utters.  That being the most absurd part of the movie, I'll... well, I'll go into that later in a Microscope post.  Anyway, hilarity ensues as a man who's gotten by with shooting off words everywhere suddenly finds his most valued asset horribly restricted to the point where he can't even leave notes for people without leaves falling.  But he learns a valuable lesson, blah blah blah.  This story pretty much ends the way you think it does, so it spoils pretty much nothing saying that the agent learns his lesson, and at the eleventh hour the tree is reborn, and everybody lives happily ever after.

Honestly, the reason why I am writing this review is for this one aspect, a relatively throwaway scene in a wider movie that gets better only at the end.  See, Eddie Murphy's agent character has a dorky white assistant.  Now, as he wordlessly comes in to try and communicate something or other, said assistant suddenly breaks down and admits that he and a female coworker have been cavorting about in Eddie Murphy's office as animals.  Seeing the scene as a furry, I am massively disappointed as having furry be this guy's weird thing, mostly because Hollywood had decided to misrepresent the fandom. Again. 

Go see it if you want to; now that you can rent it for a buck twenty it sorta makes it worth it.  In my opinion, the movie only really gets good at the end when Eddie Murphy finds his epiphany and uses his last few words to repair his crumbling life in an almost beatific way.  Other than that and some scattered scenes that almost rescue the movie, it was mostly meh.