'Runteldat!' Martin Lawrence is no Richard Pryor

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

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MARTIN LAWRENCE LIVE: RUNTELDAT (Rated R for sexually graphic language and material) Two Stars (Fair). A Martin Lawrence concert film that's long on crude material and canny characterizations and short on actual punch lines. He wants to be Richard Pryor, but he's not. Starring Martin Lawrence. Directed by David Raynr. Paramount Pictures. Rated R (sexually graphic language and material). 104 minutes.

"Runteldat" allows the comedian to compare himself to, among others, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., even while doing a routine about how satisfying it would have been, just once, to see MLK kick butt, rather than turn the other cheek.

The name that is never spoken in this film but the one that seems to hover over everything is Richard Pryor.

"Runteldat" is a direct descendant of "Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip," in terms of Lawrence's attempt to express a worldview and use his own fabled foibles as food for both laughs and thought.

"Sunset Strip" allowed Pryor to plumb the depths of his freebase addiction — including the time he set himself on fire — in funny detail. He did it with a certain humility, expressing how lucky he was to be alive even as he wrung painful laughs from his own weakness.

Conversely, the centerpiece of "Runteldat" is supposed to be Lawrence's frank discussion about his various encounters with the law over the past several years: "I ain't waitin' for the 'E! True Hollywood Story'," he says.

But where Pryor was humble, Lawrence is defensive. Even as he recounts an incident where police captured him after raving wildly in the middle of a Los Angeles intersection with a gun in his belt, he's derisive of the press coverage. He says they blew it out of proportion (even as he admits that, in fact, the spree was drug-induced).

Lawrence is of the philosophy that everyone stumbles on the bumpy road of life; he just happens to be more visible when he does. Don't hate him because he's human; hate the press for exposing his humanity.

He also has a few words for critics, most of which cannot be reprinted in a family newspaper. "They're like the scum of the earth," is one of his kinder assessments. This lengthy riff thus inoculates him against bad reviews, which he can ascribe to hurt feelings on the part of critics who were stung by his remarks. I know I shall try to rise above.

There is, of course, another huge difference between Lawrence and Pryor — Pryor is funny and Lawrence, for the most part, is not. Pryor's true descendant, in terms of his ability to perceive the larger human comedy, is Chris Rock.

Lawrence is just a guy with a lot of attitude and some funny faces. His comedy premises are often hackneyed or just plain crude, calculated to provoke shocked laughter, without following up on a deeper level.

Lawrence does have an uncanny talent for sketching characters with just a slight change of voice or accent and attitude. His impression of a white hoodlum cursing out a cop (to illustrate something a black person could never get away with) is priceless. And a lengthy routine about a man being unwisely candid with his wife after having too much to drink is as precisely observed as one of Pryor's Mudbone routines, if a little too long.

Too much of the film is spent with Lawrence sermonizing about brotherhood and getting along in the wake of September 11. But even then, he undercuts his own "We are all one" message with mean-spirited routines, such as his post 9-11 urge to physically confront anyone who looked like an Arab. And his routines about women have a misogynistic tang that's impossible to miss.

The problem is that his material is rarely as strong as his performance. Most of his bits rely on his physical and vocal characterizations; but too often, the characters are the joke and there is no punch line.

Rated R for sexually graphic language and material.