Review: Chris Rock's Kill the Messenger

Just got a chance to catch Chris Rock's Kill the Messenger this weekend. I had not seen Rock's stand-up for quite a while. The last concert of his that I was fortunate enough to see was his Never Scared.

Historically Chris Rock will put out a good HBO special. His previous works were edgy, cutting at the everyday social fabric that weaves its way through the modern world's presentation of such things as race relations and culture. His stuff has been really funny since he left SNL years ago. For the most part, a platform like HBO seems to allow Rock to really express his own personal style. It was the emergence of cable productions like the Chris Rock Show that helped Rock rise to prominence.

So I was excited to see the newest release in the continual Chris Rock onslaught. For the most part, Kill the Messenger wasn't much to talk about. He decided to try something a little different this time with the presentation. He went on a world tour that included South Africa, London and New York. What he decided to do was take video clippings from all three of those destinations and mash them together to make up the concert video. So, one moment you would see him telling a joke in New York, the next joke you would see being performed in South Africa and so on.

What made it odd from a production stand point was the timing. Sometimes the material didn't flow because you would see Rock repeat the set up over and over again from each destination. There was a lot of repetition and as far as comedy goes, that makes for some strange timing. What was unfortunate was that often times when they would play with Rock's performance that way, the joke didn't have much of a pay off.

Unfortunately it would seem that a lot of his premises had been done before. It was strange seeing Chris Rock do hack relationship material. At one point he actually says, "I'll bring it back," after losing the audience during a barrage of jokes about women in relationships.

There was another odd part to the show. What some people may not know is that when Chris Rock had the Chris Rock show one of his writers was Louis CK. Louis CK is a great stand up as well. CK recently released his own concert special entitled Shameless. The show is great. Here is the thing. They do a lot of similar material. They touch on very similar language issues and actually hit a lot of the same premises. It would seem that CK is still writing for Chris Rock and they released their specials around the same time. It just didn't do it for me.

I would have liked to see more from Chris Rock but hopefully in the future he will return to form and have the killer laughs happening again.