A Thousand Words: Critic Reviews

It makes you want to see Murphy team up with Judd Apatow, or even take on a dead-serious dramatic role - do anything but star in another movie like this one.

In the simplicity of its premise it embodies the notion of high-concept entertainment. In its execution it demonstrates how technical efficiency can drain the life from a story.

The concept is unoriginal, the scenarios aren't funny, and its message is banal. Plus, Murphy alternately hams it up and phones it in.

Even when "A Thousand Words" is counseling us to just be quiet and in the moment, it can't just be quiet and in the moment.

If only this Eddie Murphy flick had taken its own advice and spent a little more time being reflective instead of hyperactive, it might have overcome a trite script and awful, obvious excuses for comedy.

Murphy, without the words to go along with his bug-eyed double-takes and the mugging, is lost here...He's never been a silent comic, and never will be.

The poster art for "A Thousand Words" shows Eddie Murphy with duct tape over his mouth, which as a promotional idea ranks right up there with Fred Astaire in leg irons.

In "A Thousand Words" the camera stays about two inches from Murphy's hyperactive face, and you start to see the strain and desperation in the actor's eyes.

With "A Thousand Words," Murphy plunges headlong back into the swamp of insipid comedies he'd just crawled his way out of.

Even Murphy's largely wordless, physically adroit performance can't redeem this tortured exercise in high-concept spiritualist hokum.

Even 2003 Robin Williams would have thunked this script in the fireplace by page 50.

Shallow performances, script and direction mute the laughs and the insights in a movie that ultimately doesn't have much to say.

Follows directly in the footsteps of Bruce Almighty, Click, Liar Liar, Groundhog Day and any other post-Freaky Friday high-concept redemption story that inevitably crossed Tim Allen and Adam Sandler's desks at some point.

The idea of taking one of Hollywood's best-known motor-mouths and reducing him to mugging and charades is definitely novel - and utterly misguided.

Eddie Murphy should have just said the word "No" to this tired, formulaic comedy.

A Thousand Words is not worth any more dismissive words. It needs to make like a tree and leave.

A thousand words? Try two words: stay away. Murphy does a pretty good job keeping up with the various indignities heaped on him but the movie as a whole ends up sinking.

a poorly conceived and startlingly miscast comedy that works to every one of its stars' weaknesses.

You've got one of the funniest verbal actors in the business in Eddie Murphy, and you put him in a movie where he can't talk. It's already a recipe for disaster.

'A Thousand Words' is not unspeakably awful.

'A Thousand Words' is not unspeakably awful.

The sort of awful formulaic crud that 30 Rock brilliantly mocked just before Leap Day.