Once in the Life

Laurence Fishburne has made a career out of playing intense characters with a lot going on behind his piercing eyes. Heck, he even made Ike Turner seem smart. But maybe he's just good at acting smart, because his directorial debut comes off as sorely miscalculated. Based on his own play Riff Raff, Once in the Life is basically a Reservoir Dogs knock-off, in which Fishburne's character 20/20 Mike (so named for his "20/20" ability to sense trouble) and his white half-brother Torch (Titus Welliver) convene in an abandoned apartment building to determine what went wrong with a recently botched heist. Complications ensue and betrayals emerge, as we might expect, but in far less interesting a fashion than Quentin Tarantino handled in pretty much the same story. Further adding to the miscalculation is Fishburne's astonishing miscasting of himself as a sort of idiot-savant crook with a Brooklyn/Latino hybridized accent that just isn't convincing. He may be a smart man, but he doesn't play dumb too well (any of the other roles in the film would've been more appropriate). There's also a really grating "scat"-style voice-over narration from Eamonn Walker (Oz) as Mike's running buddy Tony the Tiger (sample: "I was branded beast, at every feast, before I ever became a man"), and repetitions of "clever" lines just to make sure we'll hear them, like Torch's running catchphrase, "I heard you twice the first time." Strictly for die-hard Fishburne fans, and even they might be getting awfully fidgety by the end.