The title of Martin Lawrence's concert should have been: I'd like to Thank Jesus! Starring Martin Lawrence Call me crazy, but a stand up comedy concert should be funny. Don't get me wrong, Martin told some jokes, but not after he gave a monologue of why Jesus is God, you can be forgiven, crime is bad, drugs is bad, race is equal. Sure, be like Richard Pryor and throw a moral out to the audience may once or twice during the show, but every five minutes? You So Crazy was a heart attack of laugh out loud funny 90 minutes. This piece of garbage was something Martin did for a pay check and something he can leave behind to his grandchildren to make him look like a super guy. Enough said...

After watching Martin strike out three times in "Blue Streak," "What's the Worst That Could Happen" and "National Security," I'm glad that this film came out to prove to audiences that, yes, he is still funny. The problem is, and this is not uncommon among many comedians/actors, when he's given a script (especially a poor one) he hams it up to the extreme and simply comes off as brutally annoying. When using his own material, he feels much more secure, and as a result he's much more funny. His on-stage energy is incredible, but unfortunately like many concert films it drags at times. It's hard not to make a concert film drag, since you're stuck staring at the same set and same actor for nearly an hour and 30 minutes. When you're part of the live audience, you're better able to capture his intensity, which makes the experience more enjoyable, but engaging a movie audience with this material is more of a challenge. That's why I was interested in the commentary, in which the directors and producers explained all the work put into making the film. Before hearing the commentary, I didn't know there was much work put into these types of films, but they spend lots of time choosing which camera angles to cut to, maintaining continuity, framing shots while Martin constantly maneuvers around stage and choosing how to neatly splice together material from each of the two concerts.Despite Martin's journey into PG-13 territory with his most recent films, I didn't forget that he does indeed have an amazingly filthy vocabulary. So I was prepared for excessive profanity and explicit sex talk. But there are moments where he goes way too far, and comes off as merely crude and disgusting. Nevertheless, I laughed a good deal, and I don't understand the extremely low IMDB rating. And despite all the crudeness, Martin does deliver some good morals. I liked his motto: "Ride this motherf**ker 'til the wheels fall off," pertaining to how you live your life, savoring every moment and not giving a crap. His other motto, "No one is immune to the trials the tribulations of life," is also memorable and full of meaning. Martin may be criticized heavily for his run-ins with the law, but what does that say? That all other comedians are saints? Even the supposedly morally correct Bill Cosby has vices of his own. No one is perfect. No one's life is a bowl of cherries. Martin confessed his sins, and now it's time to move on.Finally, I liked the fact that Martin's act wasn't filled with the hackneyed black people/white people cracks I was negatively anticipating. If your money got sucked down the drain by buying tickets for Martin's lame recent comedies, then "Run Tel Dat" is definitely worth seeing, because the guy DOES have talent. And don't let these crappy films fool you. My score: 7 (out of 10)

This concert movie doesn't come close to his 1994 concert movie "You're So Crazy". Martin's heyday was 1991-96. It seem like after his movie "A thin line between love and hate" he just went downhill. I really hate to come down on the brother but he's in his mid to maybe late 30s and has the mentally of a twenty year old. Since his thin line movie the only movies I've enjoyed by him were Blue Streak and Big Momma's House. The rest of the movies he starred in sucked. That movie Black Knight was a waste of film and he always play that same overzealous role he portrays. I know Martin is trying to make a comeback,but instead of trying to make people laugh he should really study on some new material.

***There is no bodily fluid, secretion, emission, odor, ejaculate, orifice, protuberance, function or malfunction that Martin Lawrence overlooks in "Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat." The word "runteldat" is short for "run and tell that," but Lawrence doesn't abbreviate much else, spelling out his insights into the human physiognomy in detail that would impress a gynecologist. If it proves nothing else, this movie establishes that it is impossible for a film to get the NC-17 rating from the MPAA for language alone. This takes the trophy for dirty talk, and I've seen the docs by Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay.Pryor and Murphy are genteel humanists in comparison to Lawrence. Clay is a contender. He doesn't rise to quite the same standard of medical detail, but he has the same rage, and the same tendency to reduce the female gender to its orifices and functions. When Lawrence reveals that he was married but is now divorced because "it didn't work out," we think, "no kidding!" His attitude toward women is that of a man who has purchased a cooperative household device that works perfectly until the day it astonishes him by giving birth.The film is nevertheless funny, if you can get beyond the language or somehow learn to relate to it as the rhythm and not the lyrics. (If you can't, don't go. This movie is as verbally offensive as Lawrence can make it, and he gives it his best shot.) It is funny because Lawrence is a gifted performer with superb timing and an ability to mimic many characters and suggest attitudes and postures with lightning-quick invention. There's something almost musical in the way his riffs build, turn back on themselves, improvise detours, find the way again, and deliver. Curious, but the humor is almost all generated by the style. Buddy Hackett once demonstrated to me how you can do Catskills-style humor with irrelevant words and it's still funny because the timing and delivery instruct the audience to laugh. Lawrence raises that technique to an art form. If you read the script of this concert film, I doubt if you'd laugh much, because the content itself is not intrinsically funny. There are no jokes here that you can take home and use on your friends. You have to be there. It's all in the energy and timing of the delivery, in the way Lawrence projects astonishment, resentment, anger, relief, incredulity and delight.The film opens with a montage devoted to his well-publicized troubles, including an arrest for disturbing the peace and a collapse from heat exhaustion that put him into a coma. There are segments from news programs reporting on these difficulties--not real programs, curiously, but footage shot for this movie. The he launches into a tired attack on "the media," as if somehow it created his problems by reporting them. He also discusses those problems, not in the confessional style of Richard Pryor, but almost as if he was a bystander. He moves on to berate critics, which is unwise, because the average audience correctly decodes attacks on critics as meaning the performer got bad reviews. (No performer has ever attacked a critic for a good review.)This opening segment is shaky, as Lawrence finds his footing and gets a feel for the audience. Then he's off and running, for nearly 90 minutes, in what can only be described as a triumph of performance over the intrinsic nature of the material. His description of childbirth, for example, makes it sound simultaneously like a wonderful miracle, and like a depraved secret that women hide from men. His descriptions of sexual activities, in all imaginable variations, depend heavily on what can go wrong in terms of timing, cleanliness, technique, equipment and unforeseen developments. Sex for Lawrence seems like the kind of adventure for which you should wear protective gear.You wonder how long Lawrence can keep this up, and at the end you conclude he could keep it up forever. I would summarize more of it, except that a lot of his riffs are about events and activities that cannot tactfully be described in print. I urge you to stay for the closing credits, not because there are hilarious outtakes, but because there is one of the most astonishing credits I can imagine: A thanks to the Daughters of the American Revolution for the use of their Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. This is the same hall once denied because of racism to Marian Anderson, who then sang instead, at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Now Martin Lawrence records a concert film there. RuntelDAT!