Wonderful character development!

From my favorite movies..

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Down to Earth (2001): Dir: Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz / Cast: Chris Rock, Regina King, Chazz Palminteri, Eugene Levy, Mark Addy: Lifeless comedy about bringing down to reality one's standards of living. If one's standards of living regarded viewing this film then living standards went down. Remake of Heaven Can Wait, Chris Rock plays a struggling comedian who dreams of presenting an act at the Apollo nightclub. Upon being hit by a truck he is sent to Heaven but informed that he was taken ahead of his time. They send him back in the body of a white rich man who is not very well liked. He learns that there are plans to murder him. He also falls in love with Regina King who is struggling to keep a hospital opened. Directors Chris and Paul Weitz previously made the much funnier American Pie but this garbage is a major step down and adds none of intelligence of their sexual high school romp. Their handling of the black man white man image of the hero is poorly portrayed. We are given glimpses of the white guy but he is never well established as a character. Rock is reciting his comedy act right from the standard setup right up to his eventual relationship with King. Her function is to be the love interest and nothing more. Chazz Palminteri and Eugene Levy are wasted in flat roles. Heavenly aspects fail because God doesn't make mistakes. No, the mistakes are made by the filmmakers. Score: 2 / 10

I am a big fan of the film "Heaven Can Wait" and I also like Chris Rock (I thought), but this movie shows a strangely charmless side of the comedian when he really needs to be likable for this film to work.A misconceived idea from the get-go, "Down to Earth" at least would have worked comically if it had emulated that old Lily Tomlin/Steve Martin soul-switching comedy, "All of Me." In that movie the filmmakers understood that the comedy is to be found in seeing both sides of the soul switch. An old white comedian should have been cast as the body that Rock inhabits (Steve Martin or Chevy Chase)and the comedy would come from Rock doing what he always does and from seeing a white guy acting like Rock. Seeing Chris Rock essentially just be Chris Rock (he is a HORRIBLE, expressionless actor to boot) throws the comedy off-kilter. We rarely see the white body he inhabits and no humor is derived from his having to navigate his youthful self through a puffy, 53 year old body.It's like it was made by people who had no training in comedy before. Don't they know that filming someone saying funny things and cutting away to people laughing uproariously is a killer of comedy? Don't they know that comedies of misunderstandings and mistaken identity require consistent points of view? I started the film with high hopes but it grew dumber and dumber as it went along, blithely missing every opportunity for real humor. And don't get me started on the "romance". Regina King is wonderful but Rock is such a limited actor that she has nothing to play off of.By the time they got around to recreating the finale that is so touching in the Beatty film and so embarrassingly flat here, I had had it. A totally valueless film and probably not a very smart premise to start with.

Chris Rock deserves better than he gives himself in "Down To Earth." As directed by brothers Chris & Paul Weitz of "American Pie" fame, this uninspired remake of Warren Beatty's 1978 fantasy "Heaven Can Wait," itself a rehash of 1941's "Here Comes Mr. Jordan," lacks the abrasively profane humor that won Chris Rock an Emmy for his first HBO special. Predictably, he spouts swear words from A to Z, but he consciously avoids the F-word. Anybody who saw this gifted African-American comic in "Lethal Weapon 4," "Dogma," or "Nurse Betty" knows he can elicit more laughter with the F-word than Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy put together. Sadly, despite a few witty one-liners, "Down To Earth" hits Rock bottom both as a contrived comedy and an improbable interracial romance."Down to Earth" utterly destroys any good will that the Weitz Brothers generated with their landmark gross-out face "American Pie." This disposable drivel qualifies as a contrived as well as confusing comedy with a thoroughly improbable color-blind interracial romance. Unfortunately, a more than competent cast—among them "The Full Monty's" Mark Addy, Chazz Palminteri of "Analyze This," "SCTV's" Eugene Levy, and newcomer Brian Rhodes as Charles Wellington, Jr.—are wasted in flat-footed, sketchy roles. Hardcore Rock fans will undoubtedly accuse their favorite comedian with trying to fix something that was never broken. Abysmally written by Lance Crouther, Ali Le Roi, Louis CK, and Rock, "Down To Earth" casts Chris as a messenger who rides a bike by day in the Big Apple and gets booed off the stage at night in Harlem's celebrated Apollo Theatre. Poor Lance Barton (Chris Rock) suffers from severe stage fright. Nevertheless, his charitable manager Whitney Daniels (Frankie Faison of "Hannibal") sticks with him through thick and thin. After Lance learns the Apollo Theatre will hold one final amateur night extravaganza, he implores Whitney to get him in the line-up. Excuse me, but if Lance is such a deadbeat stand-up comic, why does the Apollo keep inviting him back? Meanwhile, fate has something else in store for Lance. While pedaling home on his bike, our protagonist spots a pretty lady, Sontee (Regina King of "Jerry Maguire"), crossing the street, but he doesn't see the bus that collides with him and kills him. Wham! Lance Barton levitates skyward with a halo wreathed around his head. In Heaven, which resembles a cruise ship nightclub, Lance learns that an overzealous angel, Mr. Keyes (Eugene Levy of "Stay Tuned"), timed his death 40 years ahead of schedule.Heavenly honcho Mr. King (Chazz Palminteri of "Analyze This"), God's right-hand guy, apologizes and escorts Lance back to earth. The snag is Lance cannot reclaim his corpse, so he must inhabit another body. The best that Mr. Keyes can come up with is ruthless, white, 60-year old tycoon Charles Wellington. Wellington's adulterous wife Amber (Jennifer Coolidge of "American Pie") and his unscrupulous personal aide Winston (Greg Germann of "Sweet November") have just tried to poison him. Reluctantly, before Wellington's body vanishes, Lance accepts it conditionally as a loaner until Keyes can locate a more appropriate body. Meanwhile, Lance-as-Wellington encounters Sontee again. She is a nurse activist protesting his decision to privatize a Brooklyn community hospital that serves the poor. While Regina King brings a surfeit of charisma to her role as a crusading health care worker, she plays a character who bypasses credible motivation in her affairs with Wellington. Although he is no longer black, Lance not only tries to woo Sontee but also win a gig at the Apollo."Down To Earth" features Rock in his most unfunny role. The comedian's reason for making this movie seems questionable. Reportedly, he ate lunch with Warren Beatty and told Beatty that he loved the original script that scenarist Elaine May had penned for Beatty. Initially, Beatty tried the race-reversal gimmick himself in his own version by trying to cast Muhammad Ali in the title role of "Heaven Can Wait." The deal fell through, and Beatty headlined the movie himself. According to Rock, his longtime co-writers and he thought that they could 'annihilate' this classic. Moreover, he justified his choice of "Heaven Can Wait" based on his philosophy to "Do Something you can only do when you're hot." Earlier, Rock rejected a script about a busload of touring rappers, because he saw little opportunity to stretch his image in such an outing. As a lifeless comedian in "Down to Earth," Rock doesn't so much stretch his image as he inverts it for the worst! This half-baked concert film with an annoying plot does as much to cremate his comic reputation as it does the Weitz Brothers! You know a film about a comedian is in dire straits when a scene at the nightclub is played so you cannot hear the jokes, only the laughter. Similarly, the casting of Mark Addy as Wellington's butler who speaks the Queen's English but is in reality a commoner from Michigan defies logic, too. Addy is an actual Englishman, and he doesn't have to fake an accent; his accent is genuine. The major overriding quandary with "Down to Earth" is the on-again-off-again, look-a-like switcheroo that the characters make so Chris Rock doesn't disappear completely from the sight for more than a few seconds. Although Chris spends half the movie as white guy Wellington, audiences see him largely as Lance, undercutting the comic irony of watching his stocky, bald-headed, Caucasian white, alter-ego perform ghetto humor and chant derogatory hip-hop lyrics. Incredibly, Rock served double-duty as the film's executive producer and one of its four scribes. The mystery is how such a wealth of talent could grind out such an awkward, misguided muddle of a comedy. About the only redeeming feature of "Down to Earth" is Jamshied Sharifi's superb orchestral film score.

DOWN TO EARTH, in my opinion, is a terrific and funny movie starring Chris Rock! It left a big smile on my face! The funniest things about this movie, in my opinion, were Lance's (Chris Rock - DOCTOR DOLITTLE, BOOMERANG) stand-up routines, especially the ones he did at the Apollo. If you ask me, that's the perfect place for a stand-up comic to do their routines. I thought that Sontee (Regina King - ENEMY OF THE STATE, A THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE) looked VERY beautiful in all of the dressy clothing she wore, especially the attire she wore whenever she and Lance went out on a date. In conclusion, if you're a fan of Chris Rock and you haven't seen this terrific and funny movie starring him, I highly recommend it! You're in for a real treat and a lot of laughs, so go to the video store, rent it or buy it, kick back with a friend, and watch it.