Holy Man (1998)

Very well executed

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

What do you get when you combine the writer of Dead Poet's Society (Tom Schulman) with the director of Mr. Holland's Opus (Stephen Herek)? Before you answer the question, I should tell you that Schulman also wrote Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Herek's directing credits include The Mighty Ducks and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. What we get in the film Holy Man is much closer to being Ricky and G's mediocre adventure than anybody's opus.Ricky Hayman (Jeff Goldblum) is the producer for a home shopping network. Kate Newell (Kelly Preston) is a marketing consultant brought in to help fix the flat sales that are plaguing the network. As they are getting to know each other, they (almost literally) run into a holy man named G (Eddie Murphy). When G stumbles into the middle of a live sales pitch for laundry detergent, he criticizes the materialism of contemporary society and almost ruins the show. When the producer and the consultant discover that sales actually went up with this infusion of new age spirituality, a star is born.The real problem with the story is confusion over the central character and confusion over the plot. The advertising and title of the film would suggest that Eddie Murphy is the star since G is the main character. Murphy's role is really a supporting role, and the central plot ends up being the ethical transformation of the amoral producer Ricky Hayman. It's actually not a bad story, and the film is engaging at points, but by choosing to focus attention on the wrong story line, the film ends up being little more than an adequate clichÈ.If the story had focused more on the commodification of religion (or for that matter the religification of commodities) this could have been an interesting story. Any extraterrestrial visiting this planet and observing our behaviors would have to conclude that shopping is a religious ritual, the NY stock exchange our main temple, and Christmas the holiday when we worship through consumption and excess. The film teases in this direction, but this part of the story remains an underdeveloped subplot. This could have been an interesting story. Unfortunately, when all is said and done, what we are left with is another formula film filled with merely adequate performances and trite clichÈs.

Sometimes you can just tell when actors are appearing for the pay check. "Holy Man" is one such example.Plot in A Paragraph: Ricky Hayman (Jeff Goldblum) the head of an index line TV shopping channel, is given two weeks to save it, he finds answer in G (Eddie Murphy) an enigmatic holy man.All the leads fail to bring their A-Game, which is disappointing, as there is not many funnier than Murphy on his A-Game and Goldblum can steal the scene off any actor. Kelly Preston still looks great, but she seems a little off too and Robert Loggia just seems to shout all his lines.Of the cast only Jon Cryer is a lot of fun, and Betty White who is a joy as always, are the only ones who are free from criticism. And Its fun to see the delightful Jennifer Bini Taylor (Chelsea in "Two & A Half Men") in one of her first roles, appearing as 'Hot Tub Girl' in a blink and you'll miss it moment.The Morgan Fairchild scene did raise a laugh, whilst James Brown and Don Marino have cameos as themselves too and like the leads, the clearly needed or wanted the quick pay check.

Where Holy Man might have been a rather scabrous attack on the shallowness surrounding those both working within the television shopping channel industry and the industry itself, it ends up being a pretty meek love story; where it might have been a quite gripping story of one man being put through a proverbial wringer as his life and job threaten to fall apart, it ends up a damp squib of flat laughs and uninvolving drama; where it might have had its two lead male players bounce off of one another as they effectively 'body swap' their respective film star demeanours, it ends up an uninteresting and gloomy tale about the exploration of one's soul with additional life-lecturing content which drags. Stephen Herek's Holy Man is a disjointed and loose item, a film whose central tract appears to be about faux-public idolisation with a television star quite literally brought in off the street combined with the fatuity behind a shopping network, but in actual fact is about a rather dull love story between two people we don't like with one of them eventually coming to suffer a moral crisis we don't care about. Its politics and basic roots are there, but coming from the director of such films as 1988's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and 1996's 101 Dalmatians, it just doesn't quite gel.It's Jeff Goldblum's character at the core of Holy Man; here playing rather-a high flying television executive, a manager at a local television network station named Ricky Hayman whose life it is established during the opening exchanges usually begins with the cruising to work in a sports car across the sun drenched roads of Miami against some pumping techno music in order to start a new day. After waltzing into his workplace, the super smooth manager glides from one locale within the television studio to another, finding time for small talk to any women within the vicinity as well as dealing with the odd cell phone call. What comes into his little world to upset this balance of perfection is in the form of his boss, and the owner of the entire station, John McBainbridge (Loggia); whom calls him into his office and outlines, in what is a guilty example of agonising exposition for both Hayman's and the audience's benefit, what it is that's on the line. That is, that times are not good. The network is loosing more money than it is making and Hayman has two weeks to make 'x' amount of money, or face redundancy at a cost of the network's flailing sales. With Kelly Preston's Kate Newell looming ominously in the background and supposedly pining for Hayman's job, Hayman notes what's on the line and sets to work on his task of rectifying the situation so as to preserve what he's got running already.Central to these proceedings is Eddie Murphy's spiritual figure named 'G'; a man whose name is what it is so that the writers can crack dopey 'G' jokes such as "G Whizz" or "G Spot" later on; a linen cloth-clad man whom parades down the central reservation of a main road kissing the grass and smelling the air, an eternal pacifist, even ignoring impacting litter thrown specifically at him by youths riding along in an open top vehicle. Hayman is initially as reluctant to have anything to do with G: where he is calculating, G goes with the flow; where he is a ruthless businessman, G is a free-and-easy spirit and where Hayman is stiff and reactionary G is relaxed and greets everything with a grin - it is only through Kate's intrigue of the man that they are all brought together, before having to come to form a bond throughout the rest of the film. As it becomes obvious that G might just be the thing the network needs to boost sales, a crucial question arises which determines both the path and respective framework both the film and Hayman will go down; something attentive viewers will work out relatively quickly: will Hayman merely exploit the guru? Or, will he have an overall change of heart before coming to realise that those of a polar opposition, whom might initially be shunned, do in fact have their place in life and aren't all that bad once you get involved with them.Dull framework eventually comes to win out over crass political incorrectness, the aforementioned body swapping seeing Goldblum play the eccentric; loud; frenetic; all-over-the-place protagonist to Murphy's calmer; more reserved and reigned in supporting act, something both actors are perhaps more commonly associated with doing the other way round. They don't bounce off of one another particularly well, sharing little chemistry and flat exchanges while it is very difficult to get behind a character of Hayman's stature given his goal is to, ultimately, get people out there in the world to begin buying stuff again in this brutal world of consumerism and materialism. The film doesn't quite explore the fatuity of the world in which its set; limp celebrity cameos-come-pay cheques effectively defeating the purpose of what it is ought to be explored, while G's eventual status as a God-like television personality does little but highlight idolisation through TV as a phenomenon without much else. The film will build to a moral crescendo you do not care for; the fate of a love affair hanging delicately on the precipice you do not feel for and a limp attack on shopping networks as well as materialism you oddly cannot root for, Holy Man fizzling out with some nice ideas and bizarrely would-be theological content into a bit of a mess which does not particularly resonate.

Now here's a movie where the problem is in the wrong way people look at it and receive it.It's about the condition of truthfulness in our contemporary materialistic world, showing that the truthful man isn't the one who doesn't lie at all (because that's impossible to happen!), but he's the one who lies less than the others.I liked selecting the field of advertisement to make the whole movie in. This world of unceasing commercials was an epitome of the world we live of shiny seductive fibs, where everything is a commodity that had to be sold anyway anyhow, with or without credibility; which can be sold also accompanied by any bad commodity. This environment created the perfect irony with the main issue.But I liked more and more the confidential talk between the lead/the manager of the advertising channel and god in the bathroom. It became the only place where he can be alone with his conscience away from all the people's dirt; or the bigger bathroom; which can't have a way to empty all of its uncountable lies. It's one sharp, so sarcastic, paradox that introduces the toilet as less filthy than that huge liar world around. So when toilets become the only holy place in our world then what kind of "shitty" world we live indeed?! This summarizes the serious character of this movie which was wrongly understood as yet another comedy for (Eddie Murphy) while it's wholly not.It's a movie that asks what's holy nowadays. And according to its nice story; there is surely no 100 % holy men at all. Only holy thoughts. The greatest of them all is being truthful. That's holy enough...just if you can do it.