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Credits

Rated: Unrated; Genre: Comedy; With: Martin Lawrence
C
By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

If Richard Pryor is the father and Eddie Murphy the son, Martin Lawrence in You So Crazy comes off as the hollow stepchild in this amazingly unfunny concert film. It's not that he doesn't have the moves down. Whether he's reenacting his TV-side masturbation rituals or riffing on crack addicts, incarceration snapshots, and Driving Miss Dai-sy, Lawrence, clad in a spiffy black leather dashiki, meticulously resurrects the nasty vocabulary, the preacher-man intensity, and the thrusting black-as-I-wanna-be aggressiveness of his two brilliant forebears. What he lacks is a whisper of their demon-driven imaginations-that, or their genius for evoking the hilarious common denominators of sexual experience. In Lawrence's hands, the inspired vulgarity of a Pryor or Murphy is reduced to caterwauling street shtick, the hip-hop equivalent of white-guy jokes about condoms and airplane peanuts. C


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Posted Apr 29, 1994
 

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