No Good Very Bad Movies 19: The one that Eddie Murphy hated

 

Title: The Golden Child

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Mashup/ Runnerup/ Evil Twin

Rating: Dear God WHY??!! (1/3)

 

If there’s one thing that the history of this blog will show, it’s that I go easy on a lot of objectively terrible movies. With this feature in particular, I mostly haven’t even been scraping for the bottom (in no small part because I already hit it with Ingagi). Instead, I have focused on the obscure, unusual and even underrated, which has kept it relatively easy to keep what passes for my sanity. With this review, as my count approaches 20, I am declaring myself over it. From here on in, there will still be some good or “so bad it’s good” movies on the table, but my focus is going to be the ones I would go out of my way to give the hate they deserve. I’m starting with one  I had in mind from very early on, a film no less than Eddie Murphy described as a piece of kaka. I present The Golden Child… and you can probably guess the twist, Eddie Murphy was the star.

Our story begins in the mysterious lands of the East, where a band of bad guys storm a monastery to capture a very holy little boy. We then jump to the big city, where a detective allegedly specializing in missing children cases actually proves pretty good at his job until the script dictates that he should be funny. When one of the kids he’s looking for turns up dead, he’s approached by a mysterious Asian lady who insists that the killers are the same band that kidnapped the child monk. She reveals that the child is the avatar of good, destined to save the world, while his captors are determined to kill him but can only do so with black magic. Our hero joins the quest, fighting his way through goons at home and abroad. But the arch villain is no mere mortal gangster or fanatic, but a supernatural shapeshifter. To save the kid, the detective must face the embodiment of evil- to an ‘80s pop soundtrack!

The Golden Child was a 1986 action/ fantasy film from Paramount Pictures, officially in collaboration with Eddie Murphy Productions. The film was directed by Michael Ritchie from a script by Dennis Feldman with Eddie Murphy in the lead role of Chandler Jarrell, after the script was reportedly offered to John Carpenter (see They Live) and Mel Gibson respectively. Charles Dance was cast as the villain Sardo, with Charlotte Lewis as the romantic interest Lee Nang and Victor Wong as a mystic. Special effects were provided by ILM, including a stop motion/ go motion demon by Phil Tippett (all hail Phil). The movie was a commercial success, earning over $149 million against an estimated $25M budget. However, the movie received mixed reviews, and was publicly criticized by Murphy, Dance and Feldman. Its release came several months after that of Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China, also featuring Wong, which went on to last “cult” popularity. The Golden Child is available for streaming on multiple platforms.

For my experiences, this is a movie I probably would never have bothered to watch if I hadn’t seen it mentioned in a book on ILM. Even then, I didn’t give it a look until it turned up on TV. My immediate reaction was disappointment and vague irritation at what is at face value no more or less than a mediocre and very forgettable film. Over time, however, it continued to cross my mind, enough to look it up again once or twice before the viewing for the present review. It was hindsight and maturity that made me start to see this movie as something beyond the sum of its parts, not just bad and badly dated but self-important, ignorant, and even vile. Once I thought of this feature, I never questioned that I would be coming for it.

Moving forward, the very odd thing that only crossed my mind well into this review is how much this has in common with Big Trouble In Little China. I really am a lot less familiar with that film than this one, so I won’t really comment on this, beyond the fact that if anything, it’s Carpenter whose actions seem suspect. What is inarguable even from very casual consideration is that both films offered the same things, including prominent exoticism of Oriental cultures, and this one crashed and couldn’t even burn. It has a good cast, including a fair selection of Asian American talent, a decent picture of Asian religion and mythology, and absolutely the best special effects anyone could have gotten, yet it simply fails to do anything memorable with them. A definite aggravating factor is the egregiously '80s soundtrack, which repeatedly ruins what would be good, atmospheric shots and scenes. The most inexplicable failure is Tippett’s Sardo go-motion monster, which should be the equal of Dragonslayer’s Vermithrax. Maybe the horned humanoid base design makes it too Christianized, maybe the urban, daylight setting doesn’t set the right atmosphere. My verdict, however, is that the story and direction simply waste it, to the point that you can’t really see the damn thing most of the time it is on screen, and this is not a case where less is more.

Then the real ground zero is Eddie Murphy. It’s painfully obvious that those responsible for this film simply had no idea what to do with him, a common denominator with the likes of Jaws3 and Superman 3. This gets absolutely painful in his scenes with the Asian cast, which far too often amount to two stereotypes in one. What I continue to find bothersome, especially compared to the other entries I have mentioned, is that he should have had far more leeway than other African-American actors whose talent was wasted in films like this. He was the top billed star. The role was clearly and heavily re-written for him. His own damn company with his own damn name is in the damn credits. Surely, he would have been in a position to put his foot down or punch out. Instead, he contributes greatly to the willful effort to turn his character from a sensitive and competent professional in the opening scenes into an actually racist idiot in the finale. Then there’s the “goofy” laugh, most prominent at his worst moments, which is up there with the lesbians in Prey and the narrator in Ingagi as the most irritating sound I’ve heard in any movie I’ve reviewed. With the full benefit of hindsight, it’s an all-too-believable preview of the arc of his subsequent career.

Now, it’s time for the “one scene”, and I’m going with the only one that continues to buy any goodwill from me. Into the first act, we find the kid left alone with just one of his guards by Sardo, who as played by Dance (by now probably best known for his bonkers turn in The Last Action Hero) is by far the most watchable character in the film. The guard left behind is interesting in his own way, an evidently simple-minded goon with a completely unexplained makeup gimmick that makes him look like a stereotyped caveman. (The one other goon that looks at all non-human is a freaky guy who favors a flail weapon.) While the goon plays with a slingshot, the kid uses is powers to make a soda can fly back out of the garbage. The can then crushes flat before transforming into a little stop-motion man, with the top as an oversized head. Show-tune music starts playing as the character dances, more like a puppet under the control of the kid than an entity given a life of its own, but that and other points are ambiguous. It’s by far the most impressive effects sequence of the film, and enough to get a laugh out of the child-like goon (one more  romanticized “feel-good” touch that pushes my hair trigger). Then a foot comes down, suddenly enough to be surprising even if you know what’s coming, crushing the little man flat. The camera shifts almost directly up to reveal Sardo, looking more threatening than usual. It’s a very good moment, but more than usual, it’s more frustrating than the ones that are actually bad.

In closing, the one thing I will freely admit is that this is one where I second-guessed myself more than once. I’ve been working further ahead than usual, which gave me time for some feedback in advance, including a few people who like this one. I feel in about the same position I was with Sleepwalkers; nobody’s been saying it’s great, but it’s never had the notoriety of “worst”. The one last thing I felt a need to do was watch Big Trouble In Little China, after finishing most of this review including certain comments above. What stood out to me is that Carpenter’s film isn’t much “better”, least of all in its treatment of Asian peoples and cultures. Yet, it is beyond doubt more effective on almost every level, and to me the most striking difference is that it never sacrifices dignity for supposed humor, a Faustian bargain that is exponentially more ill-advised when dealing with other people’s cultures. That in itself should be lesson enough to take away, yet it keeps getting lost on the studio system, especially as they meddle with remakes and reboots. With that, I for one am done.