Levity

Writer/director Ed Solomon, who brought us California surfer-dude humor in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and alien invasion comedy in Men in Black, kills the laugh track in Levity, which could render a zombie unconscious with its excessively boring and heavy-handed melodrama. Sporting hideous long, stringy hair that even a New Age guru couldn’t pull off, Billy Bob Thornton sleepwalks from one disconnected scene to another as an ex-con seeking redemption for killing a mini-mart clerk years ago. Along the way, the paroled felon conveniently meets a pastor with Jiminy Cricket qualities and a sandpaper voice (played by the miscast Morgan Freeman) to help in his atonement. A drugged-out club kid with no determination, except to self-destruct, also randomly clutters the screen as a superfluous complication before Thornton befriends the sister of the slain clerk and gets entangled in a contrived violent showdown. Solomon should stick to comedies.