AHC/WI: Eddie Murphy Has a Better Career

Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote in his biography that he always wanted to do a sequel to Twins, starring him, Danny DeVito and Eddie Murphy. But for reason I can't currently recall (hehe...), the movie was never made. But as Arnie was a big fan of Murphy, maybe he could have done a movie with Murphy on his own? How about Eddie Murphy as the villain in Kindergarten Cop? Or Murphy in a Dr.Dolittleesque role in Junior? Either way, it would have been awesome.
 
How about instead of family-friendly comedies he does a 'Robin Williams' and goes for the serious roles? My personal opinion is that Robin's best films were Good Will Hunting and One Hour Photograph - Murphy could have taken roles from similar films and have his career revived with critical acclaim.

It can't be any worse than Eddie's recent output, could it? :confused:
 
How about instead of family-friendly comedies he does a 'Robin Williams' and goes for the serious roles? My personal opinion is that Robin's best films were Good Will Hunting and One Hour Photograph - Murphy could have taken roles from similar films and have his career revived with critical acclaim.

It can't be any worse than Eddie's recent output, could it? :confused:


This might be the best option, given that Murphy has to make some sort transition. For this to happen you probably need him to be cast in such a role in place of the nutty professor remake.
 
Good point. Any way to keep him making good adult comedies like Trading Spaces in the '90s?

I do believe he could. I can feel an argument to this that, oh, Eddie needed to change because of trends, but I don't at all feel it was trends and that Eddie Murphy as Eddie Murphy was worn out; I don't believe it ever would have worn out, but it all relied on his film decisions which grew increasingly poor and his public reception and career path reflected it. I see absolutely no reason he could have just kept being what he was, and even grown into increasingly more serious roles, if he had made better film choices.

How about instead of family-friendly comedies he does a 'Robin Williams' and goes for the serious roles? My personal opinion is that Robin's best films were Good Will Hunting and One Hour Photograph - Murphy could have taken roles from similar films and have his career revived with critical acclaim.

It can't be any worse than Eddie's recent output, could it? :confused:

This might be the best option, given that Murphy has to make some sort transition. For this to happen you probably need him to be cast in such a role in place of the nutty professor remake.

Jay Mohr had a story once where he heard Eddie Murphy do a Martin Luther King impression, and it was so spot on that he said to Eddie he should do a Martin Luther King biopic, and Eddie replied that no one wanted to see him be serious. I don't know what year that story was set in, but there's food for thought.
 
Misread the title. Here I was thinking that he was already one of the top handful of switch hitters of all time, and in Cooperstown, so how much better does this guy want Eddie Murray's career to be? :p:D
 
OK, looking at Eddie Murphy’s overall career I think the best way to sum it up is as follows:

He comes out of the gate running with three certifiable hits in 48 Hours, Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop from1982-1984. Things cool slightly for him with a less than stellar Golden Child in 1986, but he bounces back quite well with Beverly Hills Cop 2, Raw, and Coming to America from 1987-1988. After CTA, he again cools just a bit with a pair of decent, but hardly great, films in Harlem Nights (1989) and Another 48 Hours (1990). Still, neither movie is really that bad, and don’t seem to really damage his star power at all. They seem like standard “space filler” type movies in between hits. It is at this point where you can start to see where his career starts to decline. His next four films all are boring and lackluster. Boomerang (1992), The Distinguished Gentleman (1992), Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) were all terrible and seemed to dim his star potential. He rebounded with 1996’s The Nutty Professor, which was a good, entertaining flick, but did introduce Eddie Murphy to the fat suit, which as previous posters have noted, was devastating to his career.

So the first task would be to some how fix his career between the years 1992-1995. I Googled “movies Eddie Murphy turned down” and oddly enough I didn’t find anything major. Whereas we all know stories like that of Sean Connery turning down the role of Gandalf or Sylvester Stallone turning down the role of Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, there were not a lot of roles Eddie Murphy turned down. The one’s I did find seemed to be roles that came at the wrong time (Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988) or were roles he would not have fit well with (Morgan Freeman’s character in Driving Miss Daisy).

What I also notice is that Eddie Murphy didn’t take a self imposed exile from big budget Hollywood at any point in his career. He had the star power to take a lot of great roles in smaller movies, but (unlike say Johnny Depp) he chose not to.

So step one to fix his career is to get rid of Boomerang, Distinguished Gentleman, and Vampire in Brooklyn. I suppose Beverly Hills Cop 3 was all but unavoidable, so we’ll let that one slide. Instead we have Eddie Murphy: Live at the Apollo Theater released in 1992. Another raunchy stand up comedy film would probably do well at the box office, been cheap to produce, and kept his fans happy. From there have him step away from Hollywood to take on a lead role in a small indie-film. Now I have no evidence that any of the independent films from 1992-1994 ever considered Eddie Murphy or offered him a role, but let’s be honest: if you are an aspiring film maker with a small movie with a $1,000,000 budget, and Eddie Murphy’s agent calls you, you are going to take the call. So in 1992 a young filmmaker with a small, $1,000,000 budget for his first film agrees to cast Eddie Murphy in a lead role. Murphy takes a huge pay cut for the chance to take on his first serious role as an undercover police officer in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. He quickly follows it up with the lackluster Beverly Hills Cop 3 and then spends 1995 doing a trio of non-leading roles in lower budget independent films. Although his roles in Othello (with Lawrence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh), Friday (staring Ice Cube and Chris Tucker), and Dangerous Minds (starring Michelle Pfeiffer) didn’t make him a lot of money, it did show a surprising range in his acting ability and impressed insiders who started to take Murphy more seriously. His role in Friday effectively ended his fued with Spike Lee, who criticized him in the past for not doing more to help upcoming African American filmmakers and actors. And many felt his portrayal of Red, the much maligned delivery man whose bicycle and necklace are stolen by neighborhood thug Deebo showed a self deprecating humor that, up to that point, few had seen before.

At this point I think Murphy’s best move is to do Nutty Professor, just as in OTL. Nutty Professor itself was not that bad of a film, it is just hard to like since we know he follows it with crap like Norbit and Meet Dave. But after Othello, Reservoir Dogs, and Dangerous Minds, Murphy is overdue for a big budget leading role and has earned enough goodwill with Hollywood insiders to make this film.

In OTL he squanders any bump he gets from Nutty Professor and makes Metro, Mulan, Dr. Dolittle, Holy Man, Life, and Bowfinger before he is pretty much backed into Nutty Professor 2. I really think that this, even without Pluto Nash, is the low point of his career. So, in 1997 he goes back to stand up comedy with “Eddie Murphy: Uncensored!” as well as a few bit roles in Beverly Hills Ninja and Austin Powers. In 1998 he stays on script with OTL and does Mulan and Dr. Doolittle (I was on the fence about this, but I think it is OK for him to do some of these family friendly movies as long as he is mixing things up more with some old school edgy comedy and some dramatic stuff. In this context Dr. Doolittle would be OK). Rounding off 1998, we see this Eddie Murphy continuing to expand his acting chops with smaller roles in Woody Allen’s Celebrity and Quentin Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction (as Marvin).

In 1999 he earns his first Oscar nomination for his role as an aging quarterback in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday (in a role that originally went to Dennis Quaid). He also earns critical acclaim for his ability to poke fun at himself in the Spike Jonze film “Being Eddie Murphy” in which a magical doorway into Eddie Murphy’s head is discovered by John Cusack.

2000 sees this AH Eddie Murphy start to lose some luster after he follows Any Given Sunday and Being Eddie Murphy with the much maligned Nutty Professor 2. In 2001 he does the voice of Donkey in the movie Shrek before electing to sit out much of 2002. His only role would be a co-staring role opposition Tom Cruise in the box office hit Minority Report. Despite its success at the box office, the movie was not warmly received by critics, and Murphy elects (in TTL) to turn down roles in films like Pluto Nash, Showtime, I Spy, Daddy Day Care, and The Haunted Mansion. Instead, Murphy decides to return to his roots and step away from Hollywood to do a worldwide stand up comedy tour that becomes one of the most talked about events of 2003. His sold out concerts lead to a revitalization of his comedy career and a widely successful HBO special. In 2004 he returns to Hollywood to do the voice of Donkey in Shrek 2 before again electing to take on smaller roles in films like Sin City and Jar Head. In 2006 he earned his first Academy Award, winning best supporting actor for his role in Dreamgirls. He ignores the script for Norbit in 2007 and sticks to his role in Shrek the Third in 2007. In 2008 he co-stars in the blockbuster hit Iron Man before sitting 2009 out, ignoring offers to do Meet Dave and Imagine That. 2011 he co starred with Ben Stiller in Tower Heist, jut as in OTL…

And there you have it. A bit of a stretch in places, but a respectable Eddie Murphy career. Still has its bumps (Nutty Professor 2), but a huge improvement from where it is now…
 
Nice ideas. Though I will submit a bit on Beverly Hills Cop III: In the OTL, at least according to John Landis, the movie stunk because Eddie was so depressed; the best bits of Beverly Hills Cop I being not the script, but Murphy's ad libbing and bringing spirit to it. He said he thought Murhpy could have done the same with III (Landis saying I was one of the worst scripts he ever read himself) but that Murphy was depressed at the time over his career (as it was on the downturn) and that crippled him. I've also heard it said that Murphy was purposely not being funny and vibrant because he was resentful at his comedy and wanted to play things more seriously, which also badly affected the film. So perhaps Eddie managed to pull it off in this ATL, at least as an OK film.
 
Nice ideas. Though I will submit a bit on Beverly Hills Cop III: In the OTL, at least according to John Landis, the movie stunk because Eddie was so depressed; the best bits of Beverly Hills Cop I being not the script, but Murphy's ad libbing and bringing spirit to it. He said he thought Murhpy could have done the same with III (Landis saying I was one of the worst scripts he ever read himself) but that Murphy was depressed at the time over his career (as it was on the downturn) and that crippled him. I've also heard it said that Murphy was purposely not being funny and vibrant because he was resentful at his comedy and wanted to play things more seriously, which also badly affected the film. So perhaps Eddie managed to pull it off in this ATL, at least as an OK film.

I have to agree that a more animated Murphy could have saved this movie. But the script was absolutly horrible. I really think they should have switched it up a bit. Axel Foley going to Beverly Hills to solve a crime in Detroit was getting old and stale. Maybe have it switched, where the cops from Beverly Hills now come to Detroit to assist with an investigation there and they are the fish out of water rather than Murphy. You know, have Axel trying to pass off Judge Reinhold as his long lost partner in crime while they are undercover. I think that might have worked a lot more than what they went with...
 
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