Eddie Murphy names the two worst movies of his career, and the one he’ll defend to the death
Apart from Burt Reynolds, who made it a habit, it’s hard to think of another big-name actor who’s so openly shit all over their movies like Eddie Murphy, and with good reason.
While it’s not 100% true to suggest that his career had peaked by the end of the 1980s, it’s not up for debate that he never scaled those heights again. The occasional success like The Nutty Professor, Doctor Dolittle, or the Shrek franchise maintained his star power, but they were outliers.
There’s an argument that Murphy had nowhere else to go but down, having burst onto the scene as a Saturday Night Live cast member before taking his talents to the silver screen in 1982’s 48 Hrs, lighting the touchpaper on an unmatched track record of box office success that made him the single biggest star in Hollywood, bar none.
It’s impossible for anyone not named Tom Cruise to maintain that level of star power forever, and the fact that Murphy had achieved all of it before turning 30 made it somewhat inevitable that he’d nosedive eventually. In fact, things got so bad that he exiled himself from cinema altogether, and then he conspired to bungle his own comeback through a string of forgettable and formulaic films.
At various points, Murphy has trashed the second and third entries in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, his well-paid supporting role in Best Defense, his feature-length directorial debut on Harlem Nights, The Golden Child, and Meet Dave for being affronts to the movie business, and he’s not wrong on any count.
That doesn’t even include the diabolical likes of Meet Dave, A Thousand Words, Daddy Day Care, The Distinguished Gentleman, Metro, or Showtime. That’s a lot of awful pictures, but as far as Murphy is concerned, there are only two that dwell at the bottom of the barrel. When asked by Complex to name his biggest failures, he didn’t need to think twice: “Pluto Nash, Holy Man.”
The former became one of the most embarrassing box office bombs in history, and the latter was another commercial flop that Murphy had previously branded as “horrendous,” so they’re fully deserving of their place at the nadir of his filmography. A lot of people would add Norbit to that list, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
“Norbit came out right after I got the Oscar nomination,” he explained, referring to the conspiracy theory that the so-called comedy was so awful it cost him an Academy Award. “So there were articles that were like, ‘How can he get an Oscar and he did this?'”
The only memorable thing about Norbit, other than its unusual status as Brian Wilson’s favourite movie, was that it won Murphy three separate Razzies for ‘Worst Actor’, ‘Worst Supporting Actor’, and ‘Worst Supporting Actress’, thanks to his penchant for playing multiple roles, while he was also bestowed with the prestigious ‘Worst Actor of the Decade’ for everything he’d made post-2000.
“I was like, ‘Come on, man.’ Shit ain’t that bad,” he claimed, despite being wrong. “But to this day, I like Norbit. There’s stuff in Norbit that makes me laugh.” He’s firmly in the minority because it really is as bad as the Razzies made it out to be, if not worse.
