THE OLD EDDIE MURPHY ATTEMPTS A COMEBACK IN TOWER HEIST -- BUT DOES HE SUCCEED?

By Barry Dutter

Eddie Murphy stopped being funny around the turn of the century, leaving fans to wonder happened. How does a brilliant comic lose his edge? Recently, it looked like Eddie was making an attempt to get his comic mojo back as he shifted from crappy kids movies to an adult comedy.  But did he still have his "raw" edge?
It’s very telling that the trailer for his latest movie, TOWER HEIST shows Eddie being sprung from prison to embark on more misadventures. Long-time film-goers will never forget that Murphy made his movie debut in the classic 48 Hrs, where he played a convict who was released for two days of wild hi-jinx. The implications from the new trailer are obvious: This is Eddie going back to his roots. If you liked Eddie as the fast-talking fowl-mouthed horny convict, he’s back! Or is he?
Murphy’s movie career has been overshadowed by the fact that the first three movies he made are the three that were most beloved by his fans: 48 Hrs., TRADING PLACES and BEVERLY HILLS COP. He has spent most of the past 30 years squandering any good will that his fans may have left for him. I can’t think of any performer since Burt Reynolds who worked so hard to chase away his fans with a string of bad movies, each one worse than  the one before.
Sometimes it seems like Eddie’s number one career goal was to make more bad movies than his idol, Richard Pryor. (I would say Eddie succeeded at that goal.)
Eddie is perhaps the greatest living example of the fact that most comics stop being funny as they get older. No none knows for sure why it happens. Maybe it’s the same reason that rock stars write music that is less and less memorable as they age. Maybe comedy is a young man’s game.
Perhaps as you get older, become more successful, have more happiness, you lose your edge. Maybe your mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be.
Whatever the reason, it’s an indisputable fact that comedians in their forties, fifties and sixties are never as funny as they were when they first burst on the scene in their teens, twenties and thirties. We’ve seen it time and time again. Look at Jim Carrey. Chevy Chase. Bill Murray. Dan Aykroyd. Steve Martin. Even brilliant comics like Rodney Dangerfield and George Carlin were not as creative and laugh-out-loud funny in the latter part of their careers as they were in the beginning.

But perhaps the saddest example of this phenomena is Eddie Murphy. In the early 1980s, Eddie was unquestionably the funniest man alive. Whether it was in his SNL skits, his comedy albums, in movies, or doing his raunchy stand-up routines, there was no one funnier.
He was at the top of his game. His first few movies were blockbusters; each one a major crowd-pleaser.
Over time, Eddie walked away from SNL and turned his back on stand-up, leaving movies as the only outlet for his humor.  And, over time, his movies got less and less funny (and made less and less money).
Some time around the mid-1990s, the worst thing that could ever happen to a  comic happened: Eddie decide to start making family films that his kids could watch.
That was the beginning of the end for the former fowl-mouthed funnyman. From 1998 to 2010, Eddie made a string of primarily kids movies that became blander and less funny as time went on.
Eddie had started his movie career with his best role, that of the slick con man Reggie Hammond. By 2005, he was playing a human spaceship named Dave. (That's an idea so stupid and lame, the old Eddie wouldn't even have bothered making fun of it on SNL!)
By the time he came out with a kids movie called Imagine That in 2009, even families had stopped going to see Eddie Murphy movies. Sure, the Shrek movies still made a lot of money, but let’s face it, kids do not go to see Shrek movies because Eddie Murphy (or Mike Myers) is in them. Kids really don’t care who does the voice of Donkey.
By 2010, it seemed like it might be all over for Eddie as a movie star. Then he pulled a surprising career switch when he decided to go back to his roots and make an edgy comedy, where he would once again play the type of street-hustling convict character that made him famous.
The movie was called TOWER HEIST. It was originally conceived by Murphy as a vehicle for him to team up with all the major black comics of this generation (just as he had teamed up with many of the top black comics and actors of the 1980s when he made the dreadful HARLEM NIGHTS in 1989.)
Due to scheduling conflicts, Eddie was not able to get Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, Martin Lawrence, et al. Instead, he ended up with a mixed-race cast that included Ben Stiller and Matthew Broderick, who is about as pasty and white as a man can be.
Murphy reportedly came up with the basic story for the movie before handing it off to a team of writers.
Anyone who has followed  Murphy’s career knows that the films he conceives and writes himself are usually among his worst (NORBERT, ANOTHER 48 Hrs, VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN, the fore-mentioned HARLEM NIGHTS.) Naturally, hearing that TOWER HEIST was another Murphy brainstorm would lead one to be worried.
And then there’s the fact that Murphy hasn’t been genuinely funny on film since the year 2000, when he made THE NUTTY PROFESSOR 2, and I’m being very generous in calling that so-so sequel funny.
For most of the 90s and 2000s, Murphy had settled into playing parts where he wasn‘t even trying to generate any laughs. Seeing Murphy play a straight man to a bunch of talking animals in not one, but two, DR. DOLITTLE movies was surely a sad sight for any fan.
So it was with some curiosity and some hesitation that I approached Murphy’s comeback vehicle, TOWER HEIST. The previews looked somewhat promising. Murphy flirts with the fat chick from PRECIOUS. Not hilarious, but amusing. Would this movie be a return to the horn-dog Murphy of his early films? I knew I couldn’t get my hopes up too high, though, because TOWER HEIST was a PG movie, not an R like his early ones.
In other words, Murphy was still making a movie his kids could see. It’s just one he wouldn’t have to be as embarrassed about as usual.
I saw TOWER HEIST and found it disappointing. Murphy plays only a surprisingly small role. He appears in a few brief scenes at the beginning of the movie, then he disappears for a long stretch, and then he’s in the last 45 minutes or so. So I would hardly call this a starring role for him.
Still, many great comics have successfully stolen movies with much smaller parts over the years.
The question is, did Murphy deliver that old magic in his small role?
The answer is: not really.
For starters, the script is all over the place. What starts out being a heist movie tries to get clever when the gang realizes they will have to steal something other than money. They wind up trying to steal a car made out of gold, a dopey “only in the movies” plot device that was taken from an old episode of SPEED RACER.
There are a few double-crosses, and a complicated heist, but ultimately the movie is uninteresting.
As for Murphy-- he’s okay in the movie. In the beginning, you’re so psyched to see him doing something “adult” again that you laugh out of the hope that the old Eddie is back. But as the movie goes on, you see that this is not really the case
This is middle-aged Eddie, the one who has been surrounded by sycophants for the last 30 years and doesn’t really know what’s funny any more. There is a common mistake that unfunny people make in the movies that if you say something loud, that automatically makes it funny.
That’s basically what Murphy is doing here. He says a line loudly, and you laugh because it’s Eddie Murphy, and then you stop and think, “Wait, that wasn’t even a joke. That was just a guy talking loud.”
TOWER HEIST isn’t a total embarrassment -- Murphy probably won’t want to take this one off his resume, the way I’m sure he would love to do with 95% of the movies he has made in the past decade.
But as a comeback movie, there’s not much to it.
I guess I just have to get used to the idea that Murphy will never again be as fresh and funny as he was in 1982.
This was a nice try -- it’s good to see Murphy actually put a little thought into a role instead of just hacking it out. But this was not the comeback movie we thought it would be.
Audiences seem to feel lukewarm about the movie. It started off strong, but word of mouth spread real quick. The movie only made $75 million at the box office, a far cry from Eddie’s 100 million + smash hits of yore.
I guess we should be thankful that Eddie even tried to make a “grown-up” movie for a change. This one was not the home run we all hoped it would be -- more like a base hit. But maybe it has whetted his appetite to being funny again. We will see.
Sadly, I think TOWER HEIST was only a temporary break from the crappy kids movies. Murphy is currently in pre-production for his next movie, an adaptation of the 1970s cartoon show HONG KONG FOOEY.

Phooey, indeed.