Who says 'Words' will never hurt you?

Phoning it in: Eddie Murphy offers a lackluster performance in the unoriginal comedy 'A Thousand Words.' (Credit: By Bruce McBroom, Paramount Pictures/DreamWorks Pictures)

It doesn't take much verbiage to sum up A Thousand Words (* ½ out of four, rated PG-13, opens Friday nationwide): bad.

This Eddie Murphy comedy is essentially 1997's Liar Liar with the presence of a guru who provides lackluster words of wisdom.

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

Murphy is Jack McCall, a self-absorbed, fast-talking literary agent who can talk anyone into anything. He ignores his wife (Kerry Washington), skips out on baby chores and berates his assistant (Clark Duke).

His ethics are sorely lacking. He'll say anything to get what he wants, even lying that his wife is in labor with twins so he can bypass a long line at Starbucks. (The product placement is particularly pronounced: Starbucks figures into several useless scenes.)

Jack is not only selfish, he's lazy, scanning only a few pages of the works of the authors he represents. He decides that his next literary coup will be a book by popular New Age guru Dr. Sinja (Cliff Curtis). He has no interest in Sinja's philosophy but joins a group of people absorbing Sinja's counsel amid yoga poses.

While everyone else is clad in loose white garb, Jack is wearing tight-fitting black. The obvious message of good and evil, open and uptight, is made even more obvious when Jack fakes a mystical vision during a yoga meditation. He yells, screams and carries on to denote his moment of zen. But, of course, it's all about dollar signs.

The guru initially resists him, then decides to let Jack publish his book to teach him a life lesson. Handily for Jack, Sinja's book is only five pages long.

But that's not the worst of Jack's problems. The smooth operator's life is turned around by a mystical Bodhi tree that appears in his yard. Each time Jack utters a word, a leaf falls off, and Jack is convinced that when all the leaves are gone, he'll die.

So about two-thirds of the movie consists of Murphy mugging, gesticulating and finding alternate ways to communicate. All this is meant to be outrageous and hilarious, and it might have been perhaps sporadically funny — had the situations not been predictable, forced and inane.

At one point, his wife begs him to talk, but his fear of death trumps even his concerns over his crumbling marriage. Her words sum up the general exasperation of viewers: "Enough with the pointing and the grunting."

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