And while we may bemoan any number of lousy movies that Eddie Murphy has made, there are still plenty of gems. At best, we hope that the quality of the material remains high even as the nature of the material changes. At some point, everyone grows up or wants different things, especially once they've attained financial and critical success in their field. The Eddie Murphy of 1982 was young and hungry with something to prove. I don't think this retreat to family-friendly fare is a necessarily grand tragedy. In this sequel, Klump's second Buddy Love experiment resulted in the good professor's brain slowly dying. He took it a step further in The Klumps (which scored his biggest live-action opening weekend with a $44m bow in 2000), where he not only presented Buddy Love has a harmful and destructive force but an explicitly brain-killing one. In June 1996, the Eddie Murphy who made 48Hrs and Beverly Hills Cop was not required anymore, so he killed the persona while presenting it as an inferior compared to the a kinder, gentler, and more humble Eddie Murphy persona (the put-upon family-friendly regular guy who reacts while PG-rated comedy happens around him). Eddie Murphy has pulled the same switch, often casting himself not as the cause of comedy but as a hapless victim reacting to it. For example, Sandler and Carrey both began playing more ordinary people who encountered abnormal situations as opposed to the aggressive comedic force. All of these films came either at the end of a career or at a major turning point, whereby afterward the star in question rarely played this kind of characters again. Murphy is showing his disdain for the persona that we all consider "the real Eddie." In a skewed way, The Nutty Professor operates in the same vein as John Wayne's The Searchers, Humphrey Bogart's In A Lonely Place, Jim Carrey's The Cable Guy (which came out a week before The Nutty Professor), and Adam Sandler's Punch Drunk Love.Īll of these star-persona deconstruction movies have iconic movie stars playing their iconic characters in a real-world environment with real-world consequences, where behavior/attitudes that once were considered funny or heroic are now rendered unpleasant if not outright frightening. But societal and racial implications aside, it is arguable that Mr. It could very well be Eddie Murphy channeling his inner "Those kids should pull up their pants!" Bill Cosby. Whether I agree with that sentiment or not (it's not my call), I would argue that Murphy was making a statement about the kind of humor that he specialized in during his youth or at least how he perceived that kind of humor a decade or so later.īuddy Love is the personification of the Eddie Murphy that we knew and loved, but in this film, he was clearly not only a villain but a character to be loathed and eventually feared. Taken in context with the next 20 years of Murphy’s career, The Nutty Professor is a feature-length condemnation and exorcism of the Eddie Murphy that made Raw and specialized in profanity-laden and racially and politically charged tirades (Buddy Love is the only one who drops the "n-word"). Professor Klump realizes the value of his true self as Ms. Buddy Love is also the 1980s Eddie Murphy persona that we all claim to love and 'want back.' But Buddy Love's charm quickly turns sour, as he reveals himself to be cruel, heartless, vain, and outwardly hostile to anyone who would stand in his way. Klump temporarily turns into Buddy Love, the thin, handsome, outrageously witty and openly abrasive ladies-man.īuddy Love is the kind of man who Professor Klump thinks can romance fellow professor Carla Purty (Jada Pinkett Smith). After being humiliated in a nightclub by a brutal insult comic (played in no small irony by Dave Chappelle), he creates a scientific concoction to become what he considered his ideal persona. The core arc of the film involves the portly but brilliant and kindhearted Professor Sherman Klump and his self-esteem issues. But looking back at the film with the benefit of hindsight, it is something else altogether. It is the film that restored Eddie Murphy's box office luster after several years of commercial and critical whiffs. Twenty years after its release, Tom Shadyac’s remake of The Nutty Professor is remembered mostly for its groundbreaking CGI-effects work, it's superb multi-character performance by Eddie Murphy (which should have merited an Oscar nomination, natch).
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