The Golden Child is a weird movie. The first star vehicle for Eddie Murphy to be rated PG-13 after a string of R-rated hits during his meteoric rise in the 1980s, the film feels like Murphy strolled into Gremlins or The Dark Crystal in the middle of production and just started doing bits. Indeed, the original script, titled The Rose of Tibet, was not a comedy at all, and was envisioned as a serious Raymond Chandler style action fantasy thriller. (Murphy’s character is literally named Chandler in the film, although his private investigator Chandler Jarrell is less Phillip Marlowe and more Inspector Clouseau meets Axel Foley.) Consequently, The Golden Child struggles with its tone – it’s too kiddy for adults and a little too dark for children, effectively making it a movie for no one. Indeed, Murphy went on to bash the film after its release despite his initial excitement over the project (more on that later) and the fact that it generated decent box office returns.
The Golden Child hit theaters 34 years ago this week, and was recently added to the Paramount Presents line in a sharp new Blu-ray release complete with collectible packaging (a thing for which I have been and always will be a complete sucker), so I felt like this was as good a time as any to re-examine the thoroughly unique fantasy comedy. It’s frequently left out of the discussion of Eddie Murphy’s relentless box office domination of the 1980s, even though it was his second starring role and one of the biggest movies of 1986. Watching it again on its own, over thirty years removed from the context of Murphy’s white-hot stardom and all of the expectations riding on his rising career as a blockbuster talent, it’s a charmingly bugshit little movie that is as endearing as it is muddled. The Golden Child is an undeniably flawed film, but it deserves some recognition for being so incredibly weird and such an appreciably big swing so early in Murphy’s filmography.
Chandler (Murphy) is a detective specializing in missing children, tasked with rescuing the mystical Golden Child from the clutches of an evil wizard named Sardo Numspa (CharlesDance). With the help of the mysterious karate monk Kee Nang (Charlotte Lewis), Chandler fights off waves of absolutely wild-looking henchmen who all appear to be half-transformed werewolves for reasons that are never explained and travels to the mountains of Tibet to recover a magic dagger. Numspa wants the dagger in exchange for the Golden Child, but in reality, he just wants to use it to kill the Golden Child and gain ultimate power, or something. That part is never made entirely clear, but we are told that Numspa killed a teenager and fed the Golden Child her blood to make him vulnerable to earthly harm, which is both an absolutely wild wrinkle to include in your all-ages Christmastime release and a detail that makes us wonder why Numspa didn’t just drop a brick on the kid’s head after feeding him the vulnerability spell.
Anyway, Chandler gets attacked immediately after returning to America with the dagger, with Numspa killing Kee and taking the dagger in the process. After meeting one final time with a lady who is revealed to be 80% snake in one of the most bizarrely edited scenes I have ever witnessed - Chandler gets tired of her vague hints and rips aside her concealing screen, unleashing a grotesque stop-motion creature to which Chandler never actually reacts before the scene abruptly concludes with James Hong reiterating that Chandler is the chosen one – Chandler follows a magic parakeet to Numspa’s lair and recovers the dagger, which is lying in the middle of the floor of an unguarded room that is fully visible from the front window. He rescues the Golden Child with the help of the Biker of the Apocalypse, but Numspa transforms into a demon and chases Chandler to a cistern. They have a fight in which Eddie Murphy himself can’t even suspend his disbelief long enough for us to accept, ending with Demon Numspa is crushed by a ton of debris. Chandler rushes back to Kee’s dead body so the Golden Child can use his vaguely defined magic to resurrect her, at which point Numspa reappears for one final awkward battle that ends with Chandler stabbing him with the mystic dagger so hard he literally explodes. Kee is resurrected, and Chandler walks off into the sunset with his new family unit while doing a tight five about Star Search. As I said, The Golden Child is a strange movie.
The plot holes are numerous, the character motivations on a scene-to-scene basis are indecipherable, and the entirety of Murphy’s dramatic acting amounts to reaction shots of him staring blankly off-camera or at the corpse of his warrior girlfriend. (Murphy has since become a fine actor, but this is an extremely early role and it shows.) But The Golden Child is so unapologetically weird that its many idiosyncrasies become fascinatingly endearing – one broadly comedic scene of Eddie Murphy improvising with Lewis on a basketball court ends with an abrupt cut to Murphy somberly photographing the body of a dead teenage girl at a crime scene. There are a few whiplash moments like this scattered throughout the film, and while they are sacred monuments to unintentional comedy, there’s a charm to the clumsiness that I wouldn’t normally feel, simply because the movie itself is so wonderfully strange.
More importantly, there’s simply no denying the draw of Eddie Murphy, particularly at this stage of his career. He could read the ingredients from the back of a box of cereal and still find some way to make it entertaining, and he runs laps around The Golden Child’s bonkers-ass script. He goes off-page in every single scene, but rather than bringing the movie to a halt, his bits actually mesh pretty well with the hokey action and exposition. It’s like Eddie Murphy’s The Mask – Jim Carrey’s second outing as a leading man was similarly an extremely high-concept fantasy film about a working-class guy thrown into the middle of some magic bullshit that he doesn’t understand or really even care to. Both The Mask and The Golden Child were also big effects films, with absolutely bananas visuals paired alongside a comedian essentially doing his stand-up routine.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, Murphy was extremely excited to do this film. In contemporary interviews included on the Blu-ray, he refers to The Golden Child as the best script he’s ever read (of course, he said this in 1986, and he’s read quite a few more since then). Something about the fantastical oddness of the story appealed to him, perhaps because it would’ve been so unlike anything else being offered to him at the time – this was right after the monster success of Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs., so his inbox was presumably stuffed with action movies featuring a wisecracking hero. His enthusiasm for the project clearly evaporated once the film came out, but you can see it onscreen with the energy he brings to every scene, even the stuff that doesn’t really make sense. (Still not clear on why Numspa stole the dagger only to leave it on the floor of his living room in his Los Angeles bungalow.) After Beverly Hills Cop’s titanic success, Eddie Murphy could’ve done any movie he wanted, and he picked this one. There’s something appealing in the film’s DNA, even if the execution is clumsy.
The Golden Child is a remarkable oddity. It’s a jumbled Chosen One story awkwardly planted in modern-day California with a villain who doesn’t make a damn bit of sense and stakes that are never completely clear. But Murphy tears through it with his megawatt appeal and injects it with a playful life it never would have had without him (they nearly cast Mel Gibson, and to be frank, no thank you). Not every gag lands (Charles Dance’s character routinely mispronounces the letter J for some inexplicable reason), but Murphy himself is so irresistibly likable that he can immediately redeem the scenes that fall flat with a quick aside or even just his trademark laugh. He doesn’t understand what’s going on any more than we do, but he’s having a freaking blast. Also, where else can you watch Eddie Murphy kiss a visibly surprised Charles Dance on the cheek?
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