Photo credit: Adam Miszewski
A far cry from his turn-of-the-millennium heyday, the last few years have not been kind to Chris Tucker, with the Rush Hour star learning the hard way how poor business management and extravagant living can derail even the most successful careers. At one point, Tucker was the highest paid star in Hollywood, but running afoul of the IRS has left him with a lien on his home and well upward of $10 million in back taxes. With so much on his plate, film roles have been few and far between. Aside from a well-cast turn in 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, he hasn’t made a movie in nearly a decade, inspiring a return to the standup comedy that launched his career in the first place, which, while a fiscally sound decision, pays less dividends creatively.
Warming up the respectable, but by no means impressive, crowd for Friday night’s performance at the Riverside Theater was journeyman comic Terry Hodges, who provided some road-tested laughs about relationships and debt collectors, but mostly just zinged latecomers as they made their way to their seats. With everyone settled in and his 15 minutes up, Hodges left the stage, at which point the lights dimmed and a highlight reel of Tucker’s films splashed across the screen overhead, covering everything from Friday on, which served the dual purpose of introducing the headliner and letting the crowd get the urge to shout his most quoted lines of dialogue (DAYUM!) out of their system. As it concluded, Tucker danced his way onstage to the strains of James Brown’s “The Big Payback” and jumped feet first into his set.
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It was to be expected that the show would rely less on strong jokes than his live-wire personality, but, as it progressed, the flimsy material showed through. There was some solid, self-effacing stuff about his money troubles, as well as a few scatological and sexual bits in the classic Def Comedy Jam style, but mostly he simply leapt from one zany impression to another, mimicking past co-stars (his Jackie Chan needs some work), famous friends like Michael Jackson or just his favorite musicians. He managed to carry most of it through sheer force of charisma, but, by the time he randomly started singing “Luck Be a Lady” à la Frank Sinatra Jr., things became rather tiresome. Tucker may be due for a comeback, but this particular act seems unlikely to do the trick.
