by Phillip Ellis

Created on: March 16, 2008

Will Smith, more than any other actor working today, loves to take on roles where he is the movie, and on a screen for most of it. He is the type of charismatic star that can carry that off, turning average movies like Bad Boys and I-Robot into good movies. He does it to great effect in 'Ali' and is doing it again in 'I Am Legend'. But when he's up there and the movie isn't so good then it really does look vacuous and magnify the weakness of the rest of the script, as it does with this one and, of course, the ghastly 'Hitch'. Smith hasn't done a decent movie since that mesmeric performance as Mohammed Ali back in 2001 and now he has steered away from playing likeable jive talking hero's he may go chasing the roles he thinks will earn him acclaim over big bucks.

Like Eddie Murphy at the start of his spectacular demise, Smith is also showing signs of being self-indulgent, casting his young real life kid Jaden to be his son in this movie, claiming in the 'extras' that 'no other actor came close in auditions to being right for the part'. Well he is your son Will! But when the "star" starts making those calls then who is going to tell him his son isn't right for the role? Fortunately the kid's fine and it works out, but for me that's a slippery slope.

The title 'The Pursuit of Happyness' is spelt wrong because its the wording on a cheap downtown San Francisco childcare outfit in the movie, the only daycare Will Smiths character can afford at the time, spelling clearly not the Chinese immigrants forte who run it, a place where you don't want your kids to be all day. Its also a subtle metaphor for the movie in that happiness, however you spell it, comes from the pursuit of it, rather than the word itself, in this case the true story of how medical salesman Chris Gardner went from penniless single parent to the owner of a multi-million dollar stock brokerage. When the real Chris Gardner looks back over his life in the films extras he realized it was the journey and not the goal that gave him the most satisfaction in life, which many of us can relate to. But as far as rag to riches biopic goes this is a huge disappointment. The real Chris Gardner appears as the man who walks past Chris and Christopher at the end of the movie.

-The Plot-

Its 1981 as we join Chris Gardner (Smith), his son Chris Junior (Jaden Smith), and his wife Linda (Thandie Newton) in their spartan but pleasant San Francisco apartment in a likewise district of the beautiful city, but the three struggling

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