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A messy fantasy comedy thriller that just doesn't pay off
One of those hits that no-one seemed to have a good word for back in 1986, The Golden Child was the film that took the shine off Eddie Murphy after the huge success of Beverly Hills Cop and showed that quality control certainly wasn't high on his agenda. It may have been profitable, but the steep drop in takings implied that audiences were as unimpressed as critics with this messy fantasy comedy about a private eye trying to save a mystical Tibetan child from Charles Dance's shape-shifting demon. Clumsily rewritten from a Mel Gibson thriller to a lazy Eddie Murphy ego trip, the final screenplay as filmed is pretty poor, with a few elements hinting that it might once have been the makings of a more interesting film along the lines of Big Trouble in Little China, but it's desperately hobbled by not giving its star any real comic material to work with and either expecting him to adlib something on the day or simply assuming the audience liked him so much they wouldn't notice. Unfortunately Murphy clearly couldn't think of anything much to fill in the blanks either, leaving his character increasingly floundering, albeit not as badly as a spectacularly awful Charlotte Lewis, one of those flavor of the year British starlets who can't act to save their life. Since she can't fight either, she's also laughably obviously doubled in her martial arts scenes as well as, somewhat bizarrely, in a few shots of her walking, though tragically they never found a double for her acting who could do more than just the one blank expression.
There are just enough odd little moments like a semi-successful dream sequence (one of a couple of scenes to show the surviving traces of John Barry's almost entirely rejected score) or the occasional one liner that hits home to just about make it worth persevering with if you're grimly determined to make it to the end, but it really doesn't repay the effort. Still, you do get to see Randall Tex Cobb in white tux, top hat and Mongolian makeup as one of Dance's minions, which is something you don't see every day...
Paramount's DVD has an okay but unexceptional 1.78:1 widescreen print but a trailer is your lot for extras.
