Bulworth

Bomb Rating: 

Yes, Warren Beatty raps in "Bulworth"; the effect is an entire audience writhing in agony.

Here is a list of a few things that are less painful than listening to Warren Beatty rap:

1. Hammering the wrong end of a nail through a steel girder with your penis.
2. Listening to Anna Nicole Smith explain the significance of the GNP to the national economy.
3. Sliding bare-assed down the world's longest slide just after it's been resurfaced with low-grade sandpaper.
4. Eating one habañero pepper for every floozy Beatty has ever slept with.
5. Watching "Reds" in one sitting.

Yes, Warren Beatty raps in "Bulworth"; the effect is an entire audience writhing in agony. Unfortunately, we're stuck with rappin' Beatty for two hours as he plays the incumbent Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, who's suicidal and pretty much lost his mind. As a consequence, he runs around California telling it like it is.

Nobody can figure out the "new honesty" thing: not Bulworth's trusty manager, Murphy (Oliver Platt), not his wife (Christine Baranski), not the insurance chairman, Crockett (Paul Sorvino), who's financing much of his campaign. Naturally, all this honesty allows the whacked-out Bulworth to tap into a new vein of popularity.

After the first scene in which Bulworth tells the members of a black church to "get behind someone other than an ex-football player who stabbed his wife," the movie goes steadily downhill. For the most part, it just repeats the same joke in different forms. Beatty raps, tells some more people off and tries to bed Nina (Halle Berry). Given how much experience Beatty has with those three things, he should have just stuck to bedding starlets.