Lenny Henry is a big comic star in England and "True Identity" is an attempt to share his talent with U.S. audiences. Unfortunately, though Henry obviously has charm and wit, the film is lethargically directed and never builds any real comic energy.
That's particularly disappointing since the director is Charles Lane, whose utterly enchanting, virtually silent black-and-white feature "Sidewalk Stories" was a very enjoyable film on the art house circuit last year (and later played on PBS television).
Henry stars as a down-on-his luck New York actor who aspires to play "Othello" on Broadway. The plot goes into gear when he finds himself sitting beside a particularly surly passenger (Frank Langella) on an airliner that seems doomed. As the plane shakes and goes into a dive, everyone panics . . . everyone except Langella.
It seems Langella feels he's already experienced death, calmly confessing to Henry that he's a gangster whom the FBI believes was killed five years earlier. Through plastic surgery and a new identity, he has managed to become a prominent arts figure in Manhattan, while perpetuating his criminal activities.
Naturally, the plane doesn't crash, which is a relief to Henry . . . until he realizes that Langella now wants him dead.
So, Henry enlists his best friend, a movie makeup artist (director Lane), to help disguise him as a white man. Eventually, in his new Caucasian identity, Henry is mistaken for a hit man and ordered by Langella to kill . . . himself.
The screenplay for "True Identity," by Andy Breckman ("Arthur 2: On the Rocks," Richard Pryor's "Moving"), is an expansion of a very funny Eddie Murphy skit that Breckman wrote for "Saturday Night Live" some years ago. But something was definitely lost in the transition.
Aside from ripping off his own work, Breckman steals liberally from other films, most prominently "FX," "Tootsie," a dozen movies about hit man mixups and a reversal on Melvin Van Peebles' "Watermelon Man" (Van Peebles has a cameo here as a cabbie).
That's no sin, of course, since screenwriters often steal from other movies, but Lane is never able to bring any of Breckman's ideas to life in a way that is particularly funny. There are dozens of potentially amusing setups that go nowhere, while the film just wheezes along.
Henry seems to be a competent comic actor, and the white makeup is as utterly convincing as Henry's impersonation of an uptight Caucasian. The rest of the cast is also good, with one glaring exception — Lane, in a secondary role that seems patterned after the kind of nerdy guy Spike Lee always plays in his own films. Unfortunately, unlike Lee, Lane is a liability to his own movie.
But the film as a whole, from the editing to the music to the performances, never seems to catch fire like it should, and the result is a comedy that just keeps making promises but never delivers.
Worse, aside from a few isolated moments, it simply isn't funny.
"True Identity" is rated R for considerable violence and profanity, along with some sexuality.