Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

HEAD OF STATE is a Dreamworks SKG presentation rated PG-13 for language, some sexuality and drug references. The run time is 95 minutes and the film debuted to American audiences on March 28, 2003.

Chris Rock is definitely one of the best stand-up comedians in history, at least from where I stand. A lot of acts like to use satire in their jokes, but Chris Rock is one of those great performers whose jokes on race, sex and politics have enough hearty zingers and underlying sentiment to make his material stand the test of time. His observations of "Black People vs. N*ggaz," "Crazy White Kids," and women's reliance on "Platonic Friends" may be common and a part of most people‘s everyday lives, but the jokes are priceless and original. What Rock loves to do with his comedy, like great legends like Richard Pryor and George Carlin do, is to give the truth presence and kick all pretension in the balls. Chris Rock has been such a gifted force in the comic world that it seems as if he was poised to infiltrate film for quite some time.

Unfortunately, every single ounce of talent and energy Chris Rock has on a stage in front of a packed Brooklyn crowd is lost on the transfer to the big screen. Chalk up HEAD OF STATE, his directorial debut, in that category. I was quick to forget he made such duds as DOWN TO EARTH, BAD COMPANY and POOTIE TANG, and I’m all too eager to pass this one on by.

Mr. Rock goes to Washington in this film, playing a local hero and self-appointed Alderman of the slums of Washington, D.C. Yes, there is a ghetto in the city of the Presidency. But Mays Gilliam (Rock) has taken it upon himself to right the wrongs of his city, and is looked up to many as a local hero as he saves an elderly woman and her cat when they are in danger of being blown up by developers. However, his luck is running lower by the second, as he comes home to find his girlfriend Kim (Robin Givens) blow up right in front of his face and break up with him on the spot. His workplace gets the eviction tag, and his bike is run over by a bus.

But a Senator named Bill Arnot (James Rebhorn) sees him on the news, and sees a gold mine. You see, the current presidential election is in deep dookie because a major presidential party dies conveniently in a freak plane accident, and the opposing party is held over by Vice President Brian Lewis (Nick Searchy), who is an 8-year VP, a war hero, and the cousin of Sharon Stone. This is enough credential and non-potential to wipe out any new opposition, but Bill is sure his party is going to be screwed anyway, so why not pick out a working class hero to be a candidate? With their eyes on thousands of minority votes, he sends his advisors Martin and Debra (Dylan Baker and Lynn Whitfield) to give Mays the news. They also guide him through the political motions, giving him a security guard, a decoy, and a professional, trained sex kitten to provide a crowd.

Chris Rock is no Robert Redford, and Mays Gilliam isn’t satisfied with sanitized TV ads and scripted speeches. He wants to provide Americans with the truth and also show he’s the underdog, rallying up his supporters with the battle cry “THAT AIN’T RIGHT!” and going around the country in order to show Texans, Wisconsin dairy farmers, Tennessee church folk, gays, pimps and hos just who the real deal is (and all those character types are given equally dreadful stereotypes). But there’s always a controversy to get in the way, and when Bill has a sudden change of heart about letting Mays become the first black president (he wants to be a head of state himself), he decides to trick the public into thinking Mays is really a jerk.

For his running mate, Mays gets his bail bondsman brother named Mitch (Bernie Mac) to help out. With a sharper mouth than his brother, and also a tendency to slap and punch everyone in sight, Mitch helps provide a nice loud, blunt voice to clear the way for the return of Mays Gilliam. But can he win?

Chris Rock is a funny man, but not when he’s forced to be a team player or victim of compromise. Rock is the kind of man who works best in an uncut, uncensored atmosphere, like the HBO shows and Kevin Smith comedies show, because he is one of the few people whose obligatory profanity is more of a genius adjective-and-attitude credibility to his work. When Rock gets blunt and direct, he can generate side-splitting effects, and when it comes to playing in safe PG-13 material, pitched to crowds less mature, Rock is too eager to please, and it doesn’t work. As an actor himself, I am shocked to say that he has a very limited range, and every time he does perform in a film, he employs elements of his on-stage material, but not in funny, lacerating or creative ways. Out of all the performances he made, I still say his best role was in NEW JACK CITY, way back in 1991. It was a serious performance, and Rock delivered on all accounts.

Working with producer/writer partner Ali LeRoi on the screenplay, Rock is downplaying the satire he knows how to deliver with the necessary vulgarities, dumbing it down to a depressing degree. He is also relying on the same kind of tired devices which permeated better movies like THE CANDIDATE, THE DISTUNGUISHED GENTLEMAN and BULWORTH, and also injects Capra-esque populist attitude by the dozen, a lot of times exaggerating with tiresome cliché like as he is in Tennessee with the Sunday citizens admitting he likes not only God, but Elvis Presley. The sitcom-friendly jokes and forced exposition gives this material the feel of a political satire cartoon, without the political satire. I wasn’t even sure of what this man’s true platform was!

The only time the movie gets to really offer some laughs is whenever Bernie Mac’s character shakes up the campaign, being an intimidating force on TV interviews and in person, and when Mays’ political debates reach the desire to tell it like it is, with mall workers who can’t afford clothes and a policy where crack and cocaine are cheaper than cures for asthma and AIDS. However, when you see these scenes, you know its as if he mixed in them in order to show he’s got enough material for a new hour-long special, but just doesn’t want to pepper it with more edge. I felt as if Chris Rock was going to pull a stand-up routine on the campaign stage, and in some way he did, but it wasn't really funny. And though Bernie Mac can be funny, whenever he punched out somebody it seemed as if he was punching me in the stomach.

The potential for comedy is overblown and made so blatantly obvious, it’s like Power Point For Dummies. We have to endure the inevitable scene where he has a coming out party, and plays some funky R&B music (once again, we hear Nelly’s now-officially-tiresome “Hot In Herre”) in order to dance with his potential sweetheart, a waitress/gas station cashier named Lisa (Tamala Jones). They shake their groove things, and before you know it, all the stuffy white folks do a jungle boogie right out of nowhere! Cut to Chris Rock with a turntable looking like a DJ for “In Living Color,” and him telling the crowd to repeat his words and raise the roof. This whole “stuffy white folks being taught black hipness” shtick is getting ten times thinner by the movie; after seeing it in BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE and WHAT A GIRL WANTS (the variation was that it was a tween girl strutting for posh Londoners), I would believe the screenwriters’ pen should dance up some better material.

And the scenes where we see a KKK bigot and a video image of Osama Bin Laden saying they are fans of Brian Lewis are simply unfunny. The continuous reliance on Lewis’ slogan of “God Bless America…and no place else!” is just one more cynical ploy in overkill.

Rock is attempting be a director, but it looks as if he is aiming for low standards. Well, it works. The clumsy editing piles on the sight gags, most of them too short to notice or too leaden to laugh at, like as when we see boot camp for the campaign ho brigade or when Mays envisions himself assassinated before he reaches finishes the Oath. He also directs most of the scenes like he‘s making a string of gangsta rap videos, and throws in Nate Dogg with female booty dancers just for continuity (speaking of which, you can spot a couple of goofs every ten minutes). The reliance on over-the-top slow motion, fading breakaway shots, and poor close-ups represents an amateur at work, and it’s sad to learn such hack is named Chris Rock.

None of the cast members stick out, since they are either winking at the camera in terms of how bad they ham this film up (Robin Givens definitely) or how detached and wooden they can be (poor Tamala Jones). Lynn Whitfield’s character looks like an intelligent woman, but a bizarre choice in hair style later on makes her look like she’s a down-home mother of three. The villains are too lame to be effective comedy menaces, the supporting players condescend to their lame roles, and as for Chris Rock, as funny as he may be, is too awkward and fishing for Everyman sentimentality, and not emotionally capable of playing this role straight. He’s not as bad as Adam Sandler doing Gary Cooper, but I don’t say Rock should start getting the Morgan Freeman or Sidney Poitier roles. Only Bernie Mac displays the right comic timing and hilarious attitude in his underused performance of the brother, which is surprising seeing as how he can’t act off Rock with dignity.

What was Chris Rock thinking? He just neutered himself thanks to this, and this isn’t the right sort of self-sacrifice this man should be considering. With blandness mistaken for empathy and old school jokes presented for satire, this movie lacks the bite and scathing humor a movie like this deserves. A PG-13 film at a brief running time limits the potential throughout, and it looks as if Chris Rock will remain a slave to Slapshtick and The Sitcom Syndrome in future projects. HEAD OF STATE doesn’t reach the horrific racist lows of one BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE (which didn‘t even deserve a single star), but when it comes to pure comedy and inspired intelligence, Chris Rock’s fiasco fares too low in the polls to merit a recommendation. By combining both the grades of the actual film and the DVD which I will be getting to, HEAD OF STATE shows that one out of five stars voted for it. The party’s over!

Presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer (or separately available full-frame disc), HEAD OF STATE has a pristine-looking film transfer which displays no recurrent problems with sharpness and colors, but has a few bad things going for it. Let’s start with the positives: I found the movie to be considerately great-looking in terms of the sharpness, only going soft at least a few times, but not so much that the picture loses clout. Colors are presented in a vivid, true fashion, with cinematography actually able to light blacks and display their proper flesh tones. Also, no signs of grain or artifacts popped up. Bad news is that you get some scenes with noticeable haloes, only some, but those damn things are common, and mild pixelation occurred in only a couple of shots. Fairly average, nothing special.

A Dolby Digital 5.1 mix (and also one in DTS) fares consistently well for an audio track. The slamming hip-hop music provided some neat bass and sounded positively fresh, and the rear speakers usually reinforced them or added some additional outside atmosphere (particularly the rain that pours on Mays) to beef it up. However, the front speakers provided most of the audio, also including the great-sounding dialogue passages, and the use of low-end was hardly an issue.

The movie’s extras fail to stimulate. The DVD box promises “outrageous” Chris Rock commentary, but with this audio commentary, you’ll hear Chris Rock in a more sedate, low-key manner than your expectations predicted. You’ll also get the lack of real humor in his commentary, as for the most part he likes to point out the settings and the conditions in most of them (like the 110 in ghetto degrees which heated up the neighborhood set) as well as the casting and opinions of his stars. He also likes to point out some instances of possible dissatisfaction with the film and get into the task of being a feature film director for the first time. Unfortunately, silences occur, and Rock isn’t lively or funny enough (though he tries) to carry me through the feature one more time.

Six deleted scenes are rather uninteresting filler. For instance, we have a scene where Mays and Debra go over debate topics, all of which are old and have been drained of any remaining humor (sheep cloning, mad cow disease, family values, Jennifer Lopez’s butt). There’s also another “Nate Dogg and the chicks” appearance, a whole sequence where Mays is forced to be last in line after an insane wait to see the Deputy Mayor, and some more campaign material which has no great comedy or conviction.

I am getting sick and tired of these “Making of” extras which turn out to be nothing but fluffy EPK a**-kissing. However, we end up another in the form of the 13 minutes that make up The Making Of HEAD OF STATE, which is basically interviews that focus on the actors, the characters, and the lame story. The strains of “Hot In Herre” show up all throughout, but we get a greater reliance on film clips, which composes the bulk of this entire featurette, I think even more so than the chat. In other words, BOR-f*cking-ING!

The remaining extras include a 60-slide photo gallery, a section of production notes, plenty of cast and filmmaker biographies, and sneak peeks for WALK THE TALK and BIKER BOYZ. The DVD has no saving grace, and HEAD OF STATE remains a potential candidate for the House of Stinkers in a one-year term.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older