CRIMINAL MISCONDUCT

By RICHARD CORLISS

The movie audience's relationship with a favorite star is like a long-term, off-and-on affair. The star seduces us, he disappoints us; after years of the same-old, we take him for granted; then he does something wonderful to win back our love. Eddie Murphy, from his explosion on Saturday Night Live in 1981 to his current turn in the cop drama Metro, has been a beguiling, exasperating beau. With his horse laugh and his wizardry at impressions, he rose to eminence as the little guy who can take charge. But he became addicted to adulation and lost the common touch. His appeal waned; the comeback attempts proved futile. Until, that is, last summer's The Nutty Professor.

That hit comedy--which won Murphy the year's Best Actor award from the National Society of Film Critics and, in a just world, would snag him an Oscar nomination--was like a great date with an old lover fresh from rehab. Eddie was once again cute, dazzling, working overtime to please. Relocating his strength as a mimic, he played seven characters, all brilliantly. The one unattractive figure, Buddy Love, was a wicked stretch of the Eddie Murphy personality that moviegoers had tired of: sleek, preening, abrasive, an overdog in love with itself. The other characters were marvels not just of makeup but also of comic sympathy; Sherman Klump and his pudgy, putrefactive family had humor and heart. The $130 million box-office take showed how much affection filmgoers still had for Murphy. They hoped it heralded a new Golden Age for the Golden Child.

On the evidence of Metro, maybe The Nutty Professor was less a trend than a fluke. This cop thriller bears a surface similarity to the early Eddie hits 48 HRS. and Beverly Hills Cop, but it's lame and lazy, inefficient even as the sort of action machine Hollywood can tool up in its sleep. The mandatory car chase is woefully generic; it disregards the laws of physics without raising more than vagrant musings in the viewer. Why, for example, would a cable-car-ful of passengers be too timid to apprehend the lone bad guy while he's busy wrestling with the hero?

Murphy is Scott Roper, a San Francisco cop making up his own rules in edgy face-offs with the criminal class of the Bay Area. Roper is no Dirty Eddie; he's a negotiator who has to ingratiate himself with the malefactors before he can blow their heads off. This offers plenty of chances for Murphy-style comedy, none of which writer Randy Feldman or director Thomas Carter bothered to exploit. Except for a decent scene in which Roper mimics a white bandit as a test for his galoot partner (Michael Rapaport), there's no room for Eddie to be Eddie. It's as if Carter thought the project was a smooth vehicle that Murphy could simply ride in, when it's really a hunk-a-junk the star needed to transform.

Roper is issued a regulation villain (Michael Wincott, whose menacing baritone was used to better effect in the recent Jim Jarmusch corpse opera Dead Man) and a girlfriend in peril (British stunner Carmen Ejogo). A shame the star wasn't given a character to play, witty dialogue to speak or clever plot twists to unravel. But though Roper is often at gunpoint, Murphy wasn't when he agreed to make Metro. In his bumpy tryst with filmgoers, how long will he make us wait for another Nutty Professor? How long until we can love Eddie again?

--By Richard Corliss