In Search of Eddie Murphy

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A moment's silence, please, for the late great Eddie Murphy, wild child in the promised land of superstardom. Now missing and presumed dead, the bold young adventurer was last seen in the 1984 megahit Beverly Hills Cop. Though a figure billed as "Eddie Murphy" has been spotted flitting through the underbrush of a variety of dismal movies since then, it seems likely that he is being played by a stunt double. Or possibly a stunted double.

What Murphy was looking for when he headed up-country into the wilderness of the self was not unreasonable. He needed to find a screen character that he, and the audience, could live with comfortably over the length of an entire movie. For he was essentially a sketch artist, creator on TV's Saturday Night Live of marvelous and curiously healing parodies of racial stereotypes: Tyrone Green, Velvet Jones, the glorious Buckwheat. His best early movies, 48 Hrs. and Trading Places, permitted him the freedom to do variations on these characters, but he didn't have to carry these pictures alone. He had strong co-stars in well-developed roles sharing his burdens.

And when he finally soloed in the first Beverly Hills Cop, the context was artfully fashioned for him. He was a mean-streets guy dislocatingly, dangerously plunked down on the bland streets of America's ultimate suburbia. He was poised between ambition and anger, between the need to ingratiate himself with the predominantly white mass audience and, at the same time, the need to tell it hard truths. He was a performer running risks with his audience, but more important, with his slightly schizoid self. Destructive possibilities -- of the comedian's always tenuous bond with his audience, therefore of career -- were hinted at. We were kept on edge by him, and for him.

But the fear of self-destruction often leads to self-parody, and that, in particularly dreary forms, is what Murphy has been offering in recent years. In Coming to America he was all sweet reason. In Harlem Nights he was all sour obscenities. In Beverly Hills Cop II he was simply drowned out by a series of explosions. And now, in Another 48 Hrs., he is almost invisible.

Judged purely by what director Walter Hill has put on the screen, Another 48 Hrs. is a movie mainly about the several pretty ways that glass shatters when bullets or bodies are propelled through it. It is also not insignificantly about boots. There are many elegant close-ups of them as their bad-dude owners go menacingly about their wicked ways. These are the only shots that have any passion invested in them. The rest of the film is all awkward maneuver, without wit or feeling. Screenwriters John Fasano, Jeb Stuart and Larry Gross labor to arrange a plausible reason to reunite Murphy's smooth crook, Reggie Hammond, with rough cop Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) and place them in the kind of violent situations and give them the kind of rude comic exchanges that made the original 48 Hrs. a hit.

If this movie is all surfaces, Murphy is all subtext. He is, in effect, asking the audience to do his work for him, to read into his minimal smirks and gestures, his first-draft gags, the unique qualities he once possessed. There is something smug and sleek about him. Sometimes, frankly, there is something threatening, almost Godfatherish, about his deadly, bland self- possession. Indeed, the credits for Another 48 Hrs., like those of all his recent films, are loaded with names from his entourage. One gets the impression that he has used his independence to seal himself off from anyone capable of saying anything but yes to him. Which means, of course, that he is sealed off from the world that was the source of his anger, his inspiration, his clarifying strength.