How in the world do you critique a concert film?  There isn’t really any type of conventional acting.  Unlike a good documentary, there isn’t anything terribly exciting that you can do with its direction, and the films are made without the slightest trace of a script.  The only thing I can think of doing is breaking the film down by performance, direction and a few other miscellaneous categories.

BACKGROUND – The Original Kings of Comedy is a film about the biggest and most successful comedy tour in history.  Called “The Kings of Comedy,” the tour has grossed over $37 million, offering tickets for as little as $9.99.  The picture, which added the “Original” to its title a few weeks before release, was filmed over two nights in late February at the Charlotte Coliseum, which is where the tour started some three years ago.  Like Richard Pryor’s Live on the Sunset Strip and Eddie Murphy’s Raw, Kings basically shows four popular comedians performing live on stage.

PERFORMANCE – The four comedians - Steve Harvey, Cedric the Entertainer (both from The Steve Harvey Show), D.L. Hughley (The Hughleys) and Bernie Mac (Moesha) – weave together a tapestry of obscenity-laced stories and anecdotes.  They perform separately, with Harvey acting as the tour’s emcee.  Some of the jokes are funny, some aren’t, and some I just plain missed because everybody around me was laughing/talking so loud.  It’s nowhere near as good as Pryor’s Sunset Strip or Murphy’s Raw, or even the typical HBO comedy special, but it is at its best when improvised, like when Hughley and Harvey torment the people in the first few rows of the audience.  While each performer has his own unique material, the basic thread between their jokes is that white people are dumb and black people are poor.  While the crowd seemed to react more favorably toward Mac, I found Harvey’s routines to be the best, knocking everything from Titanic, to NFL star-turned-murderer Rae Carruth (who played in Charlotte), to the tour’s main demographic inability to pronounce the word “kings” correctly (read: not “kangs”).

DIRECTION – Like I said, there isn’t anything too spectacular you can do with a concert film.  Spike Lee tosses in the expected clips of the Kings backstage, and enough shots of the audience to let you know which jokes worked and which didn’t.  He probably could have chopped about twenty minutes – or a mere five minutes from each comedian – off of the final product, as Kings runs way too long.  Lee (Summer of Sam) is no stranger to filming live stage performances (John Leguizamo’s stage show, Freak) or documentaries (4 Little Girls).  In fact, the latter landed Lee his first Oscar nomination for direction.  A lot of Lee’s shots were off-center, but I think that had more to do with the robotic camera that ran along the front edge of the stage.

AUDIENCE – Like the audience at my screening of Kings, the film shows an interesting cross section of the black community.  Aside from the guys on my left that broke out the cold 40s and started smoking cigarettes when the lights went down, the crowd seemed really into the film.  Their reaction wasn’t as nutty as some of the things I’ve seen on Russell Simmons Def Comedy Jam (like running up and down the aisles).

MISCELLANEOUS – Kings is the first of three concert films to hit screens this year.  Look for DMX’s Backstage next month, and Margaret Cho’s I’m the One That I Want to play a limited run later this year.

1:52 - for adult language and sex related humor