by Rich Elias, Oct 8, 1998

• 107 Minutes
• Rated PG
• 2 Stars

As it should. Hayman (Jeff Goldblum) is a producer for a TV shopping network owned by a tyrant (Robert Loggia) whose high blood pressure is the cause of high blood pressure in everyone who works for him. Hayman is an obvious target since sales generated by his shows have been flat for two years. A corporate whiz kid named Kate (Kelly Preston) is sicc'd on him. Inevitably they fall in love.

An awful lot of inevitable things happen in "Holy Man." It's inevitable that G wanders into the studio, ends up on TV, and it's inevitable that his New Age psychobabble gets the bored, tired audience of the shopping network to dial the 800-number to buy the most outlandish junk you can think of. It's not as if G wants to be a huckster. He's got two ideas -- life is a journey and love is the only thing that matters. He's about 363 ideas short of becoming a desk calendar. But any glimpse of a spirit life beyond the crass mercantalism of TV shopping is different enough to get viewers to, well, respond crassly.

The meager comedy in "Holy Man" arises from watching G's unlikely success. He's not trying to sell anything, but the trust he inspires ends up boosting sales. Hayman, who has the ethics of a crocodile, doesn't have a problem with this until screenwriter Tom Schulman decides to give him a conscience because the movie needs a happy ending.

This is a formula comedy that steers toward an idea but then swerves sharply away every time. What, for example, is the point of the satire? "Holy Man" does a good job of parodying those idiotic infomercials you see on the Home Shopping Network. The most inspired sequence in the movie is a collage of them, showing celebrity hucksters like Willard Scott and Dan Marino standing up for products like a gizmo that uses car exhaust to cook your dinner. (The funniest features poor Morgan Fairchild in a career-ending role, about five rungs lower than "Hollywood Squares.")

We're supposed to think that shopping on TV is a spiritual experience for lots of Americans today. We're also supposed to think that "Holy Man" scores off this confusion of the sacred and profane. Naaaaaah. The idea is interesting. After all, the mall is the new community center in many American cities. (In Orlando, I've met retirees who spend every day at the mall because they can't afford air conditioning.) Shopping is now a recreational activity instead of necessary drudgery.

Considered as a satire, "Holy Man" loses its teeth before it can bite. Casting Eddie Murphy as G guarantees this. The raw urban hipster of Murphy's early movies has been replaced by the Mister Nice Guy of "Nutty Professor," "Doctor Dolittle," and now "Holy Man." Blame it on Disney if Murphy's lost his edge. The Mouse has closed The Mouth. There's no street talk in "Holy Man"; the rawest Eddie gets is a reference to "testicles" (that's the word he uses).

Granted, the character is supposed to be soft around the edges. Murphy-talk wouldn't be right. But I kept thinking that the Disney geniuses figured out how to repackage Murphy's chief talents: he works best as an outsider sticking it to a smug establishment (remember "Beverly Hills Cop"?) but he's also sweet, nice, with a puppy dog smile. "Holy Man" casts him as an outsider, but pumps up the actor's essential sweetness. It makes you wonder which is the sham, the Eddie Murphy of "Raw" years ago or this new Mister Nice Guy.

Jeff Goldblum as Ricky also raises questions about casting. Goldblum is wonderfully convincing when he plays Ricky as total scum, a man who'd sell his mother for a ratings point. He's less convincing when "Holy Man" requires a change of heart. As for Kelly Preston: blonde furniture, no talent required.

When I laughed at jokes in "Holy Man," I felt that I'd been cued to laugh. And I felt that the movie wasn't funny enough to make me forget and forgive its failure to deliver on its promising concept. What's worse is that "Holy Man" is rife with "product placement," meaning that manufacturers paid money to showcase their products in the movie. Every telephone says "Lucent" on the handset, even though this is not where the Lucent logo is printed. (I work for Lucent.) Ricky retreats to a closet filled with Adidas sneakers boxes. In one scene set on the Miami waterfront you see a Carnival cruise liner in the background, even though it's not part of the movie at all. Etcetera.

Product placement is the movie equivalent of The Home Shopping Network but less blatant, sort of. I mean, you could tote up a half dozen or more brand names on display in "Holy Man." Are we supposed to assume that the producers are slyly parodying, via product placement, the hucksterism they satirize in the movie? Maybe, but I don't think so. "Holy Man" is a carefully-packaged product, 100% free of ideas, unlikely to offend anyone. The fact that it is what it satirizes probably never occurred to its makers.