zofos I saw this late at night on a minor channel and I put it on expecting a laugh or two. Martin Lawrence is a good comic actor and I reckoned he might be a good stand-up comedian/actor in the style of Richard Pryor.I couldn't have been more wrong. This concert was awful. It was full of racist comments directed at white people, Muslims and people from India (Muslims and Indians are the same thing in Lawrence's narrow mind) and rambling, clichéd cod-philosophy (Lawrence, like many black comics and directors, can't resist the urge to preach when given a platform. Do we really need a lecture on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights struggle during a stand-up comedy show?). Then there were his fawning comments designed to ingratiate him with women, it made my skin crawl listening to him.Worst of all, the show simply wasn't funny and I found it boring. I turned over halfway through and flipped back to find him either still preaching or going on and on and on about the birth of his child (there was no humour in the story of the birth of his child and it was self-indulgent on his part to bore us with the details. He clearly didn't have very much to say or he would have cut this section of the show out).This show was rubbish: Runteldat!

rmart99 I like Martin as an actor. He has the ability to be funny. But what was he thinking about when he made this nonsense? I laughed mabye 3 times during this embarrassing performance. Martin seemed to be saying whatever came to his mind as he went, no type of flow. I have no problem with the profanity because when used right, it adds to the humor. But using "M*\_}rF_=*r" every other word doesn't take away from the fact that the material is weak. Then he also started with the "Let's give it up to the ladies" routine to try to gain support for his tired performance. And what was up with the slow pace? Bad enough the gag he's telling isn't funny, but now he want's to drag it out, as if he's waiting for more laughs. I had alot of high expectations for this movie. I was expecting to laugh, not wince. If Martin wanted to answer the critics, he shouldn't have 'wrapped' it up in a movie marketed as a Comedy, and have his fans pay the price. I give this movie NO STARS. Next time I hope he leaves the old, old routines at home and hope he actually practices before he performs.

smla03 ***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!

homerjsimpsonn This recent stand-up movie of his was expectedly as piss-poor as his previous, i.e. "You So Crazy".Martin Lawrence is easily one of the most annoying personalities to be recorded on film. Not only is he a lowsy actor to begin with, he's incredibly irritating to watch. His stand-up act is simply unbearable because it's nothing but Martin Lawrence and his embarassing way of talking. He overdoes everything. Every gesture, every word, is overly-black! He thinks he can be funny by acting black and talking black, almost as if he equates "blakness" with humor. (Chris Rock gets away with this because his content is actually funny to begin with.)For God's sake, THE GUY IS NOT FUNNY!!!! I didn't even crack a smile once during the nearly two-hours of his agonizingly stupid, unwitty stand-up routine.