The awful role Eddie Murphy only took for the money: “The worst movie ever done in the history of anything”
Criticising Eddie Murphy for making an alarming number of awful movies is one of the easiest and most accurate ways to fire shots at the actor and comedian. In fact, his filmography gradually grew so wretched that it’s very easy to forget he enjoyed one of the most successful beginnings to a big screen career of any actor ever.
Murphy even came clean and confessed the reason he took an extended sabbatical from Hollywood was that he’d been in too many critical catastrophes and box office blunders for his own liking, illustrated by five Razzie wins – including ‘Worst Actor of the Decade’ for the period between 2001 and 2009 – from 14 nominations.
The Adventures of Pluto Nash, Daddy Day Care, Norbit, Meet Dave, A Thousand Words, and Imagine That may have paid handsomely, but they hardly reflected Murphy’s former standing as a generational talent. He became a cultural sensation when his stand-up routines and Saturday Night Live residency wasted no time in announcing the arrival of a comedic superstar with limitless potential, which was reflected in his seamless segue into cinema.
Three of Murphy’s first four feature appearances came in Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs, John Landis’ Trading Places, and Martin Brest’s Beverly Hills Cop. He notched Golden Globe nominations for all three of them, the former helped set the template for the buddy cop caper that the subgenre is still following today, the latter was the highest-grossing release of 1984 and launched a money-spinning franchise, while Landis’ fish out of water favourite endures as an annual staple of the Christmastime viewing calendar.
However, sandwiched between Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop was Best Defense, which bombed hard. Billed as a ‘Strategic Guest Star’ in the marketing to complement Dudley Moore, the military comedy followed the lives of two characters – an engineer and a tank commander – who never actually interact.
Murphy knew the screenplay wasn’t up to scratch and felt disaster was afoot, only for the lure of a massive paycheque to be the deciding factor. “I read the script at first, and the script was terrible,” he admitted during his monologue when he returned to host SNL. “I was like, ‘What?! How dare you give me a script like this! Oh, that much money? Let’s go!'”
Refusing to shy away from his financially motivated mishap, Murphy described Best Defense as “the worst movie ever done in the history of anything.” It wasn’t quite that bad, and he’s definitely been in several films in the decades since that are exponentially worse, but it nonetheless sticks out like a sore thumb among his early work, which elevated him from small-screen comic to A-list megastar in less than two years.
Actors make movies solely for the money all the time, with Murphy being a repeated case in point for how chasing the zeroes can be massively detrimental to a career the longer it goes on. Still, at least he got Best Defense out of the way early and spent the remainder of the 1980s enjoying the view from the top of the A-list.
