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Roughly coinciding with the release of Coming 2 America on Amazon Prime, this film chronicles the career of Eddie Murphy, from his early success with Saturday Night Live, a show he's said to have "saved" in the early 1980s and which he joined at the tender age of 19, through his early hit feature films Trading Places, 48 Hours and of course Beverly Hills Cop, via his small scandal when caught in his car with a transgender prostitute and his re-emergence in family friendly movies and cartoons, and finally up to his re-invention as dramatic actor in films like Dreamgirls and Dolemite is My Name.

Now to be honest, this is a film about Murphy from a fan's perspective, that celebrates the man and his career a bit too much, glossing over his more questionable filmwork, his commercial and critical failures, his sore loser attitude when he failed to win the oscar for Dreamgirls, even his not exactly high-quality hit single Party All the Time - but at the same time it tells some fascinating stories about his early work with Saturday Night Live (a show that actually has little to no cultural significance outside of the US) and puts his filmwork into a greater context with quite a bit of hindsight. What's a bit disappointing is that while the film features a cornucopia of vintage interview snippets, it features as good as no clips showing his comedy (safe for an extended scene from The Nutty Professor) where especially some skits from Saturday Night Live would have been helpful to fuller understand his comedy. But even without that, this is a nice documentary that will help you understand Murphy and his effect on popular culture better and probably even appreciate him more.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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