This article appeared in the Village Voice in 1997

Money Talks
Directed by Brett ratner
Written by Joel Cohen and Alex Sokolow
A New Line Release
Event Horizon
Directed by Paul Anderson
Written by Phillip Eisner
A Paramount Release

reviewed by Gary Dauphin

If you pare Chris Tucker's comic appeal down to fundamentals, you end up with a helium-inflated, vaguely phlegmy sound. With only Dead Presidents, Friday, and The Fifth Element to its credit, Tucker's voice is already an identifiable trademark (think Eddie Murphy's laugh or Martin Lawrence's ears), and it's been used to good effect in supporting roles so far, the young comedian spitting out words in a barely controlled tumble that jitters up and down his personal scale of conning lows and just plain screaming highs.

Money Talks is Tucker's first starring role, and forced to carry roundly mediocre picture, he sounds mostly like a loose bolt rattling in a used car, something small and hard and about to give. Directed by Brett Ratner with none of the saturated and glossy visual style that made His videos MTV staples, Money opens with ticket scalper and fence Franklin Hatchett (Tucker) going to L.A. county lockup after snubbing TV reporter James Russell (Charlie Sheen). Franklin is accidentally busted out of jail by a French diamond thief and his copains, quickly becoming the improbable object of a shoot-first police manhunt. He ends up back with the soon-to-be-married Russell, crashing his rehearsal dinner and posing as Vic Damone and Diahann Carroll's love child when he's not dodging gun-toting Gauls.

Money Talks is predictable black-guywhite-guy action shtick, but although it shouldn't sink Tucker (I mean, look at Charlie Sheen--he's still working), quite a few audience members may decide he's just talking that same old shit.

YOU DON'T HAVE to be a genre connoisseur or video-store clerk to identify the many predigested parts of Event Horizon, derivative in the desperately workmanlike way that results from a lot of professionals simultaneously running out of ideas while on deadline.

Event Horizon is the name of an experimental starship that resembles a Klingon bird of prey--which, in the way of experimental starships, disappears without a trace on its maiden voyage. Seven years later, it reappears just outside of Neptune, so a search-and-rescue team is dispatched to the dimly lit hulk, basically in order to stand around asking dumb questions of its designer (Sam Neill, just along for the ride in a number of ways) while getting increasingly creeped out until the compartments start explosively decompressing. The rescue team is a reasonably functional crew-ensemble fronted by a gruff leader (Laurence Fishburne, looking pissed at the gig's inherent lack of star power), but the poor plotting and Paul Anderson's lazy direction give them little to do except make like drugged visitors to a science fiction flick museum: here we have the Nostromo crew quarters from Alien, there the HAL brain rooms from 2001 and 2010, there you"ll find entire sections from Disney's The Black Hole.

Horizon flirts with hard sci-fi (the ship uses man-made black holes to bend space) but winds up mainly trying to impress fans of the Hellraiser cycle (if you bend space, creatures with extravagantly scarred skin will tie you up with barbed wire and probe your orifices with drills). Much less fun than the sum of its ill-fitting parts, Event Horizon turns the Theater into a working model of the astrophysics concept hijacked for the title: a region of space where gravity slows light to a crawl.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Talking trash: Chris Tucker in Money