Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Tue 8 September 2026 1:30, UK
They say that time heals all wounds, and to some extent, that’s true; certainly, you can physically recover from injury, and your heart won’t stay broken from a break-up forever. But can you really get to a point where you look back at Eddie Murphy‘s films from the late 1990s and think, ‘Alright, that one wasn’t that bad’?
Because that period of time was not, in any way, shape or form, something you could describe as a high point in Murphy’s career. The glory days of the 1980s, when he was probably the most in-demand and talented comedian and actor on the planet, had faded, and the barely restricted danger he approached all of it with had faded to leave someone who seemed to care about making money above all.
Family-friendly nonsense comedies were the order of the day, in addition to ill-conceived one-offs like the execrable horror comedy Vampire in Brooklyn from 1995. Aside from that, there was the final part of the Beverly Hills Cop trilogy the year before, which should have finished at two films frankly, and then instantly forgettable fare like 1998’s Holy Man, which was about a TV evangelist making home shopping religious, and quite understandably lost $32million on release.
But, and here’s where revisionism comes into play, Murphy is too talented to be utter rubbish all the time, for a long time. 1996’s comedy The Nutty Professor is better than people remember it being, the actor showing his usual ‘I can play any character’ (seven of them in fact), and the film made more than $200m at the box office.
And then a few years later came Bowfinger, the comedy written by Steve Martin and directed by Frank Oz about a film director trying to make a hit without his lead actor even knowing he’s in a film at all, thanks to hiring his younger brother. Martin starred in the lead with Murphy taking something of an unusual back seat, but the chemistry worked perfectly, and it has since gone down as something of an under-appreciated classic of the era.
Murphy himself said, “Oh yeah, I love Bowfinger. That’s a funny one. It was all mostly on page, I don’t remember doing a lot of improvising. I kind of played what he wanted to play. It was all Steve Martin’s creation.”
Reviews were pretty positive on release, and the film made a modest profit, bringing in just under $100m globally. Murphy had agreed to the movie in the first place because he was a huge fan of Martin’s; he was one of the comedians that he had studied in the 1970s growing up in New York, along with Richard Pryor and Robin Williams.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
But such was his output at the time that it did not signal the start of a creative return to form. The very same year, he released Life, which wasn’t anywhere near as good, and then the following year, he put out The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, which was absolutely woeful.
Things did at least get back on track in 2001 when he voiced Donkey in Shrek, a part that would become one of his most famous, producing three more movies with a fifth on the way, and even his own spin-off movie, which is scheduled to be released in 2028.
