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Isn’t it the worst when you see a trailer for a movie that you’re looking forward to and it’s, well, a piece of crap? Sometimes it turns out that the movie is actually fantastic and just the victim of a bad trailer (such as Chronicle), and sometimes that movie is just a flop (such as The Lorax). I’ll be saving you that risk from now on, as I’ll be checking out the films with the lousiest trailers and seeing whether it’s just poor editing that made the trailer terrible, or if no amount of editing could make it good. Today’s study: Eddie Murphy’s A Thousand Words.

Please note that although released in 2012, A Thousand Words was filmed in 2008.

In the trailer, Eddie Murphy is a talkative, successful businessman with few scruples. He’ll lie just so he doesn’t have to wait in line at the coffee shop! However, after he lies to a spiritual guru, a tree grows in his backyard. With each word he speaks, a leaf falls, and since he and the tree are now one and the same, when the tree dies, he dies. And then – oh God, Clark Duke’s in this movie. Clark Duke, if you can believe it, is the smugger half of a comic partnership with Michael Cera, and is probably one of the least funny people I’ve ever seen on screen. And then after Clark Duke’s introduction comes a topical joke of the Chili’s baby back ribs song that was played out when Fat Bastard sang it in Austin Powers 2. For the record, The Spy Who Shagged Me came out in 1999, nine years before A Thousand Words was filmed.

And then comes a montage of Eddie Murphy coping with his new wordless life in comical ways and lots of mugging. Instead of using maybe 10% of his words to explain to his wife what’s happening, it looks like he’s in the doghouse with her. But it doesn’t matter since – hey, that’s Jack McBrayer! He’s usually good for a laugh. Maybe I’ve misjudged the secondary characters….nope, here’s Clark Duke again, and he’s embarrassing himself by speaking like Eddie Murphy and saying “ass” a lot at a high-powered business meeting. At least the trailer redeems itself at the end with John Witherspoon reprising his blind man character from Soul Plane.

To be fair, I didn’t expect A Thousand Words to end up being good. But I figured that it might actually be fun enough – I’m man enough to admit that I got Meet Dave from Redbox one night just for laughs and I didn’t hate it. In fact, Meet Dave is a perfectly fine kids’ film; were I eight, I’m sure I would have loved it. Maybe at the very least, A Thousand Words could be the same kind of mindless, barely acceptable form of children’s entertainment – hell, if anyone can do it, it’d definitely be from the director of Good Burger. Surprising PG-13 rating aside, it fails in every way that Meet Dave, um succeeds. Instead of harmless pratfalls, one-dimensional barely-romance, and an aura of goofiness (which is all one needs for a successful children’s movie), A Thousand Words’ overall tone is strangely more maudlin. Just because there’s a theme of death doesn’t mean the movie has to be devoid of humor.

And the attempts at humor: my God. Just about all of the attempted jokes fail because the movie fails to set itself up as, well, plausible. Sure, Eddie Murphy talks a lot, but it’s mostly only affecting his life in positive ways. He’s great at his job, his only family troubles is that his wife wants to move (where money isn’t a problem), and really his only concern is that he has to see Clark Duke all the time. Sure, he shouldn’t lie so much and he should shut up more often, but he doesn’t deserve the punishment. It’s not like Liar Liar (surprisingly) in that there’s no defining moment where his self-centered ways get in the way of the people he loves. Yes, maybe he should move to the suburbs. But is one disagreement with Kerry Washington enough to almost bring someone death?

So it’s hard to laugh at Eddie Murphy miming squeezing milk at a teat when there’s no reason that he should have to. Even though (for some reason) when he writes, leaves fall off the tree, why doesn’t he write the word “milk” once and use it multiple times? What if he had a job where writing was important (even though he works for a publishing company)? The tree goes from teaching Eddie Murphy a lesson to just being a dick tree. And the movie’s lack of, well, sense, is a major anti-comedy step, and Eddie Murphy is no anti-comedian.

I do have a confession to make: I found one scene to be funny. However, the joke involves Austin Powers and mini-basketball hoops on trash cans, so I can’t give it too much credit.

Many reviews make note of the fact that taking away Eddie Murphy’s voice is taking away his comedy. I think that’s not giving him enough credit as a comedian, because if A Thousand Words were an actual, well-crafted, thoughtful comedy, he could shine. Instead, it’s just another notch in the Eddie Murphy disappointment belt. Verdict: A Thousand Words is just as bad as its trailer.