The movie Eddie Murphy admitted his younger self would have hated: “Didn’t stand a chance”
The disparity between the way critics and audiences view movies is often quite pronounced, with films that get panned by journos often going on to be fan favourites, resulting in a huge score difference on websites like Rotten Tomatoes, and one instance of that is the 2007 Eddie Murphy ‘comedy’ Norbit.
Now I put comedy in single quotes there because, as you’ll see if you bring yourself to sit through just one minute and 50 seconds of the trailer, there isn’t much on show that’s going to raise a smile, seeing as most of the jokes revolve around ‘look how fat this person is’.
Murphy does his tried and tested job of playing almost every character in the film, which adds precisely nothing, and is a sad comparison to his ‘80s heyday when he did it in actually good films like Coming to America.
But regardless, while 9% of critics liked it, over 50% of moviegoers thought it had some merit, and so, somehow, it has become one of the most-streamed comedies on Netflix in recent weeks. Murphy’s choices of projects post-1990 and Another 48 Hours were a mixed bag, to say the least. Although his voiceover work on the Shrek franchise can’t be faulted, he also made some absolute stinkers, which should be consigned to the movie bin for good.
One of those was undeniably 1995’s Vampire in Brooklyn, a horror-comedy co-starring Angela Bassett that requires no more than a brief glance at the poster to convince you there is no chance in hell you are ever going to watch it. To Murphy’s credit, he is aware of how bad it is, and told Rolling Stone a few years later, “I had to do Vampire in Brooklyn. But you know what ruined that movie? The wig. I walked out in that longhaired wig and people said, ‘Oh, get the fuck out of here! What the hell is this?’”
Murphy followed it up with The Nutty Professor, which made a huge amount of money at the box office, before doing his donkey-from-Shrek voice two years early, except as a cocky little dragon in Disney’s Mulan. Another big hit followed with Dr Doolittle in 1998, but the same year, he showed his inconsistency by making Holy Man, which was utterly panned.
The comedian continued his self-aware streak by imagining himself back when he was a firebrand comic in his 20s and what he might think of his family-friendly movies, adding, “Would the 27-year-old have wondered what I was doing in Dr Dolittle? No. Or in those Shrek movies? No. But, you know, both the 27-year-old and the 48-year-old was like, ‘Why am I in Imagine That?’ The movie didn’t have a chance at the box office; it’s just me and this little girl and a blanket.”
And the Murphys of both generations would be entirely correct, because 2009’s Imagine That was undeniably a significant flop. The story of Murphy’s workaholic father, who inexplicably discovers that his daughter’s imaginary world holds the key to his own financial success, lost tens of millions at the box office and earned Murphy a well-deserved Golden Raspberry nomination for ‘Worst Actor’.
Murphy has shown some signs of the old sparkle in recent years, however, with the excellent Dolemite Is My Name, and a couple of passable sequels for Beverly Hills Cop and Coming to America, respectively, and now has Shrek 5 on the way later this year, plus a remake of the Peter Sellers classic, The Pink Panther.
