HOLLYWOOD - Martin Lawrence continues to attract extreme reactions from critics with his Black Knight. Clearly, his detractors sat through the film
stone-faced.
Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe and Mail figures
that "the writers must have handed in a rough draft of the script, with
lots of blank places between the dialogue where they wrote "Insert
really funny bit here." And then they went for a long lunch."
Chris
Vognar in the Dallas Morning News calls the movie, "a high
concept knocked down to its lowest possible intelligence level."
And
Jonathan Foreman in the New York Post calls it a "cheesy,
cheap-looking update of A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court.
Calling Lawrence "the Stepin Fetchit of our age," Foreman writes
that his character is "a shiftless, mugging, leering, inarticulate L.A.
black man who rolls his eyes and ambles around like one of the chimps in
Planet of the Apes." Had the film been co-produced by the Ku Klux
Klan, Foreman comments, "it could hardly be more repellently
stereotypical."
On the other hand, Stephen Hunter of the Washington
Post calls the film "slight but highly enjoyable."
And you have to
wonder if Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times even saw the same
movie as some of his more censorious colleagues. Black Knight, he
writes, "is a rip-roaring time-travel comedy tailored beautifully to
Martin Lawrence's protean talent. It has more hilarious throwaway lines
than most comedies offer up as their best jokes, and it is consistently
inspired, energetic and, most important, light on its feet."