Word: boomeranging
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Such is the problem facing Eddie Murphy, 31, as he awaits this week's release of Boomerang, his first film in two years. From the moment in 1980 when he burst onto Saturday Night Live, Murphy had the audience's eye. More, he had their affection; not just his talent but his boyish good nature won him that. And because comic charisma radiated through the characters he played on SNL, Murphy was able to jump from TV-sketch artist to big-screen draw. He took two roles Richard Pryor had rejected, in 48 HRS. and Trading Places, and overtook Pryor...
There was another crucial factor. As a black star, Murphy was pigeonholed by the industry. "When it comes to black actors," says Reginald Hudlin, the (black) director of Boomerang, "many screenwriters find it difficult to get beyond race." Then, too, the zeitgeist was changing. For all his street sass and gutter gargle, Murphy is basically a middle-class star, closer to Bill Cosby than to the new wave of African-American filmmakers (Spike Lee, John Singleton) and rapmasters (all those hot Ices). Their marketable anger made Eddie look timid, irrelevant, a hipper but still compromised version of the old Negro...
First on the list is Boomerang, a bright comedy about a wealthy ad executive -- his Manhattan apartment isn't a duplex, it's a googolplex -- who discovers what it's like to be on the used end of a romance. Murphy, Hudlin (House Party) and scenarists Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield (who wrote many of Murphy's SNL bits, plus Coming to America) were inspired by Annie Hall (which Murphy has seen five times) and by the screwball love stories of '30s Hollywood. So the movie offers an Eddie role reversal: the famous ladies' man is a demure love slave...
...Boomerang also establishes Eddie as the charming center, almost the host, of a cast of genial zanies. They get most of the laughs. The criminally adorable Halle Berry provides the movie's heart. And Murphy is the stage manager, smiling his approval. In one pretty scene a lively child named Khandra Mkhize gives a little speech, with wide eyes and beautifully broad gestures, and Eddie mimics her, gesture for gesture, charm for charm. This is what he has always been: not just the performer but the audience too. He's us, with a little comic genius on the side...
...Boomerang (June 26), Eddie Murphy also tries a change of pace -- at his peril, according to Grove. "This film does not present Murphy as a winner. It has him falling in love with a girl ((Robin Givens)) who rejects him, so it may have a weakness." But how weak can an Eddie Murphy movie be? Even his flops earn $60 million to $80 million. And the last time he played a romantic naif, in Coming to America, he made megamillions...