A classic

By now, I have seen all the movies starring Eddie Murphy (I’m only missing his last movie ‘A Thousand Words’) and it has been a very thankless task. Indeed, it is not very often that you come across an actor who managed so thoroughly to destroy his career (Val Kilmer and Nicolas Cage are some decent contenders as well). However, it hasn’t been always like that for Murphy. Indeed, in the 80’s, he was definitely one of the most popular actors, maybe even the most popular one, and this movie was a huge success and it has become by far his most iconic part. With this in mind, I had some rather high expectations and, to be honest, I thought it was slightly underwhelming. The point is that the whole thing sounded great on paper but I thought that the end-result was decent but nothing really mind-blowing. I don’t know, in my opinion, it seemed that the makers were happy with the concept and just let Eddie Murphy throw some funny one-liners without really developping this concept. Therefore, I thought the timing was a little bit off. Surprisingly, I actually prefer the 2nd installment which had a better mix between the hard action scenes by expert Tony Scott and the wild humor provided by Murphy. To conclude, in spite of its flaws, it remains a decent action comedy, it is a classic, and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

6/10