An Exercise In Nonsense

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

It's the single unfunniest thing I ever watched. It's sad how he tries so hard to come up with a good joke and all he does is curse and thinks his disgusting vulgarity is funny. He is the most bitter person I ever saw. His whole act he is trying to show how much he doesn't care, and by that only showing how much he's angry at the critics and the people with any taste and sense of humor who'd rather go through immense torture than go watch his "show". There are good comedians, there are bad ones and there are horrible ones. But this guy is in a league of his own. I feel sorry for him and even more for the people who find him funny.

************Potential Spoilers Ahead********** Martin Lawrence has absolutely lost it. He seems worn down, lacking his usual energy throughout this live show. I think his health problems have taken their tole, or if not, then I think he may have been neutered. This was an obvious rip off of Eddie Murphy's Raw (talk about losing it), but it was truely the least funny and most embarrassing live comedic performance I have ever seen. The crowd was going crazy as he was introduced, but within the first two minutes of the show you could feel the energy being sucked out of the room. Usually the comedian energizes the crowd. Martin takes himself way too seriously now, as demonstrated by the introduction scenes where it felt more like a boxer getting ready for a fight. He must have used up all his energy backstage, because he just flat sucked once he started the show. I felt sorry for Martin throughout. I loved Def Comedy Jam and You So Crazy, but those times are long gone for Martin. He has certainly lost his edge and should hang it up.

Martin Lawrence is not a funny man i Runteldat. He just has too much on his mind and he is too mad which trips his puns pretty early in the game. He tries to make fun of critics, which boils down to "f*** them". Then he goes on to rather primitive sexual jokes on smokers with throat cancer and it just goes downhill from there. 3/10

***There is no bodily fluid, secretion, emission, odor, ejaculate, orifice, protuberance, function or malfunction that Martin Lawrence overlooks in "Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat." The word "runteldat" is short for "run and tell that," but Lawrence doesn't abbreviate much else, spelling out his insights into the human physiognomy in detail that would impress a gynecologist. If it proves nothing else, this movie establishes that it is impossible for a film to get the NC-17 rating from the MPAA for language alone. This takes the trophy for dirty talk, and I've seen the docs by Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay.Pryor and Murphy are genteel humanists in comparison to Lawrence. Clay is a contender. He doesn't rise to quite the same standard of medical detail, but he has the same rage, and the same tendency to reduce the female gender to its orifices and functions. When Lawrence reveals that he was married but is now divorced because "it didn't work out," we think, "no kidding!" His attitude toward women is that of a man who has purchased a cooperative household device that works perfectly until the day it astonishes him by giving birth.The film is nevertheless funny, if you can get beyond the language or somehow learn to relate to it as the rhythm and not the lyrics. (If you can't, don't go. This movie is as verbally offensive as Lawrence can make it, and he gives it his best shot.) It is funny because Lawrence is a gifted performer with superb timing and an ability to mimic many characters and suggest attitudes and postures with lightning-quick invention. There's something almost musical in the way his riffs build, turn back on themselves, improvise detours, find the way again, and deliver. Curious, but the humor is almost all generated by the style. Buddy Hackett once demonstrated to me how you can do Catskills-style humor with irrelevant words and it's still funny because the timing and delivery instruct the audience to laugh. Lawrence raises that technique to an art form. If you read the script of this concert film, I doubt if you'd laugh much, because the content itself is not intrinsically funny. There are no jokes here that you can take home and use on your friends. You have to be there. It's all in the energy and timing of the delivery, in the way Lawrence projects astonishment, resentment, anger, relief, incredulity and delight.The film opens with a montage devoted to his well-publicized troubles, including an arrest for disturbing the peace and a collapse from heat exhaustion that put him into a coma. There are segments from news programs reporting on these difficulties--not real programs, curiously, but footage shot for this movie. The he launches into a tired attack on "the media," as if somehow it created his problems by reporting them. He also discusses those problems, not in the confessional style of Richard Pryor, but almost as if he was a bystander. He moves on to berate critics, which is unwise, because the average audience correctly decodes attacks on critics as meaning the performer got bad reviews. (No performer has ever attacked a critic for a good review.)This opening segment is shaky, as Lawrence finds his footing and gets a feel for the audience. Then he's off and running, for nearly 90 minutes, in what can only be described as a triumph of performance over the intrinsic nature of the material. His description of childbirth, for example, makes it sound simultaneously like a wonderful miracle, and like a depraved secret that women hide from men. His descriptions of sexual activities, in all imaginable variations, depend heavily on what can go wrong in terms of timing, cleanliness, technique, equipment and unforeseen developments. Sex for Lawrence seems like the kind of adventure for which you should wear protective gear.You wonder how long Lawrence can keep this up, and at the end you conclude he could keep it up forever. I would summarize more of it, except that a lot of his riffs are about events and activities that cannot tactfully be described in print. I urge you to stay for the closing credits, not because there are hilarious outtakes, but because there is one of the most astonishing credits I can imagine: A thanks to the Daughters of the American Revolution for the use of their Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. This is the same hall once denied because of racism to Marian Anderson, who then sang instead, at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Now Martin Lawrence records a concert film there. RuntelDAT!