THE GOLDEN CHILD: Paramount Presents...Blu-ray (Paramount, 1986) Paramount Home Video

Infamously - if justly - trashed by its star, Eddie Murphy as “a piece of shit”, director, Michael Ritchie’s The Golden Child (1986) is the sort of half-baked, and thoroughly fractured Indiana Jones knock-off/wannabe, adventure/actioner only a die-hard Murphy fan could love. Apparently, there were a lot of these in 1986, as The Golden Child went on to rake in an impressive $79,817,937 at the box office on a paltry $24.5 million dollar budget. But Murphy’s assessment of the picture, after all the ‘feel good’ junkets had been produced to flim-flam and promote this excrement as comedy gold, was being exceedingly kind on almost every level. Not only is The Golden Child a queer and uneasy mix of comedy and action, but Mike Smithson’s creature design for the unearthly gargoyle, with whom child welfare rescuer, Chandler Jarrell (Murphy) must do battle to protect his ‘Hare Krishna midget’ from a thoroughly fright-less and fizzling Color-Form’s spook, is cut-and-paste crud. Cliff Wenger’s art department appears to have the most rudimentary comprehension of how to integrate SFX into live-action. The penultimate showdown between Jarell and this winged nightmare is so ineptly executed it makes the rest of The Golden Child appear as a dizzying and depleted knock-off of Big Trouble in Little China (also released in 1986), albeit, with none of that movie’s richly desirable camp.  The Golden Child’s biggest hurdle is it cannot find that ‘magical’ balance between a darkly purposed scenario – the forces of evil out to annihilate mankind from the earth by making its child protector eat the blood of innocents – and all those pithy retorts written expressly for Eddie Murphy, after the initial plan to cast Mel Gibson in a more serious actioner fell through. While Murphy did acknowledge his pictures always made money for Paramount, not even he could stomach the success of The Golden Child. Henceforth, his next 5 collaborations with the studio went under a new agreement, granting him a stake in the writing process and to exert more creative control over final cut.

Indefensibly, The Golden Child sinks to a level of caliginous claptrap not even Eddie Murphy’s enigmatic presence can salvage. It takes nearly 15-minutes to wade through the bizarre prologue, an invasion of a Tibetan holy temple with the ‘golden child’ (a non-verbal J.L. Reate, imbued with magical powers) taken prisoner by Satan’s emissary, Sardo Numspa (Charles Dance). Aside: if the golden child is such an ‘all seeing/all knowing’ Christ-like figure, able to perform Jedi-esque mind tricks on his assailants, with telekinetic abilities to levitate and move inanimate objects, bring animals and people back from the dead, etc. et al, how is it he cannot foresee this advancing hoard – given interminable cut-away by Ritchie and cinematographer, Donald E. Thorin, and, set to a totally out of place techno-mumbo-jumbo score by Michel Colombier and John Barry (after a more appropriate set of cues orchestrated by Barry was rejected)? Moreover, why does Sardo Numspa need to make his snowy pilgrimage to this nearly forgotten high plateau lamasery on foot, employing an earthly goon squad as, later on, he illustrates supernatural powers of his own to merely appear, disappear, then reappear on cue? Okay, so, it’s only a movie – and not a very good one at that. Setting logic aside, The Golden Child cannot even maintain, much less figure out, its pace as an actioner/comedy, suspense/thriller, or pseudo-crime/horror movie. In its attempts to dapple the creative palette with the flecks and follies of all movie-land genres mashed together, Ritchie instead reveals a sort of daft ineptitude to put across their stylistic elements in a way that makes the story stick, either in the craw or memory for very long. Performing the proverbial ‘Heimlich’ on our collective sense of good taste and/or good sense God gave a lemon, The Golden Child regurgitates a lot of filmdom clichés in a way that is grotesquely predictable. More than any other Eddie Murphy comedy from its vintage, this one has dated severely, and, without reprieve.  

We are introduced to Chandler Jarrell, a modern-day crusader for abandoned/missing children, presently in search of one Cheryll Mosley, whose murdered remains, drained of blood, later turn up in an abandoned field. Runaway Cheryll came to her bad end via a bike gang who sold her to an Oriental thug, Tommy Tong (Peter Kwong) – later, to become Sardo’s latest victim. But before these revelations, comes another. Chandler is informed by a mysterious Tibetan woman, Kee Nang (British actress, Charlotte Lewis), he is ‘the chosen one’ on whom fate has bestowed an epic responsibility, to intervene and restore the golden child as mankind’s salvation. The first of Murphy’s cinematic outings not to receive an ‘R’ rating, The Golden Child is about as unprepossessing and awkward as a major Hollywood feature can get. Murphy is given some real zingers to bandy about, but nothing in the way of a memorable co-star on whose intellect or odd reactions to his heckling chutzpah he can bounce off. Lewis is about as invigorated in her performance as a stick of kindling, occasionally revealing her martial arts expertise and general inability to take second-string direction from Chandler. Indeed, with all her exhibited physical dexterity and stealth (she practically annihilates the biker gang after they bind Chandler to a post) and Chandler’s chronic inability to dig himself out of situations he finds himself utterly trapped and at the mercy of supernatural forces he neither fully comprehends nor can defend himself against, why doesn’t Nang just rescue the golden child herself and leave the diverting fluff stuff to Murphy’s foundering fop?

The Golden Child is so woefully struggling for anything to say, despite its brief respites into more familiar comedy, for which Eddie Murphy displays obvious strengths, it leaves the first-time viewer disenchanted and wanting for the sort of pop-u-tainment we are used to enjoying with Murphy as our star. Even Paramount was not impressed with the picture’s sizable take at the box office, comparing The Golden Child to the smash hit status of Beverly Hills Cop (1984). They might have first, in gratitude to Murphy’s faithful following for pulling them out of the hole with a box office flop, assessed The Golden Child as NO Beverly Hills Cop!  This picture didn't deserve to make the studio money! Indeed, Dennis Feldman’s screenplay agonizes over being an ill at ease amalgam of discordant themes and grotesquely misfired false starts. Evidently, the idea behind The Golden Child was to give us an Eddie Murphy we had never seen before in much the same way the costly and calamitous 1984 remake of The Razor’s Edge was supposed to squarely transform another of the decade’s great comedians, Bill Murray, into a dramatic/heroic figure. In The Golden Child’s case, producers could not resist the urge to anchor Murphy’s performance with some humdinger pithy retorts, most of them aimed at diminishing his more serious female costar by branding her a nut bar, presumably hooked on hallucinogenic drugs. Alas, as there are some truly dark and disturbing vignettes intermittently scattered throughout this picture, Murphy’s usual comedic finesse is forced to take a total hiatus, deprived of his smart-mouthed bag of tricks. In these instances, he delivers a blank and bulging stare, as if to suggest something more indignantly funny about to occur, though it never does. Granted, The Golden Child’s emphasis is on sci-fi and adventure. Yet, here too, the picture severely lags.

Charles Dance, with his classical training and steely-eyed grimace, is a formidable villain, but given precious little to do apart for appearing menacing and intermittently chatting up the devil for advice on how best to proceed. Aside: if the voice of the devil sounds vaguely familiar to some, it should; supplied by Frank Welker who also voiced Dr. Claw in DIC’s animated series, Inspector Gadget (1983-85). But The Golden Child lacks the full-tilt effrontery to go truly over-the-top into crassly commercial bad camp. Instead, it sits, interminably, in a purgatory of its own design, before trundling out its wounded hell-raiser finale with all too little hell left to raise. Falling somewhere into the no man’s land between a matinee potboiler and cheap pantomime of a better comedy waiting in the wings, The Golden Child never settles into its uncomfortable gesticulations towards the fantastic. Flirting with ideas too somber to be serious, but a personality too grand to suffer through its slender thumbnail of a plot, The Golden Child derails its best efforts on one failed situation awkwardly sidled against the next, each systematically taking down our level of enjoyment a peg or two until there is nothing left to appreciate. Even Murphy’s cocksure outsider seems to fall short of expectations.

Interestingly, while the retrofitting of Beverly Hills Cop to accommodate Eddie Murphy’s talents (the picture was originally perceived as a straight-up actioner for Sly Stallone) served the material well, the attempt to do as much here with The Golden Child illustrates either the limitations of Murphy’s actor’s craft or, perhaps, the producers’ feeble desires to take an already trademarked talent beyond its scope and mutating it into something Eddie Murphy, decidedly, is not – a heroic figure. Screenwriter, Feldman, later to find his niche in sci-fi/horror hybrids - Species (1995) and Virus (1999), conceived The Golden Child as a legit fantasy. Alas, once the ink had dried on Murphy’s contract, Feldman was forced to rethink this scenario. Much of the comedic revisions, inserted after the fact, stem from Chandler’s limited comprehension of the supernatural. Some scenes work. Others, decidedly, do not. Frankly, and having missed The Golden Child on its theatrical release, I expected a lot more from Eddie Murphy and director, Michael Ritchie, whose yen for urbane socio-political satire, usually placed into the mouths of babes, is wholly absent in the non-verbal golden child here. If anything, Ritchie has accepted the big-budget bloat of a studio-sanctioned summer blockbuster and Murphy’s built-in cache as his own calling cards to merely ‘micromanage’ rather than create another memorable movie masterpiece. Given the work was performed by Lucasfilm’s ILM, the execution of these effects-laden sequences is pedestrian at best, and hokey-jokey, just plain vanilla bad at their worst.

After the aforementioned opener, an interminable set-up depicting Sardo’s primitive kidnapping of the golden child from a lamasery seemingly caught in an 1800’s time warp, somewhere in the Tibetan high plateau, we regress to modern-day Los Angeles. From her apartment, Kee Nang, watches a local TV show where social worker, Chandler Jarrell talks about the strange disappearance of Cheryll Mosley. Believing he is ‘the chosen one’, Kee seeks Chandler out. Alas, he thinks she is either demented or on drugs. Now, a colorful bird, the astral projection of the child, begins to follow Chandler. Aside: the bird is an Eastern Rosella, native to southeastern Australia and Tasmania. So, precisely how it fits into the Tibetan mileau is, frankly, beyond me. But I digress. Cheryll Mosley’s remains are discovered near an abandoned house, assaulted in Tibetan graffiti. Chandler makes the gruesome discovery of a pot full of blood-soaked porridge on the stove. Kee implores Chandler to take her seriously. She takes him to see Doctor Hong (James Hong) and Kala (Shakti Chena as the dragon/woman hybrid). Chandler and Kee track down the Yellow Dragons – a motorcycle gang with whom Cheryll was last seen. After a struggle, Chandler gets one of its members to admit they sold Cheryll to Chinese restaurant owner, Tommy Tong. Regrettably, Tong is killed by Sardo before Chandler can question him. That evening, Chandler is drawn into a dream-like spell by Sardo who demands Chandler bring him the Ajanti Dagger, the only weapon capable of killing the Child.

Making their pilgrimage to Tibet, Chandler and Kee are swindled by an old amulet seller who turns out to be a High Priest guarding the weapon in a nearby temple. In order to be granted access to the weapon, Chandler must first pass a test of endurance. With cunning and stealth, Chandler wins the competition and smuggles the dagger past customs upon reentry to the U.S. Knowing of their success, Sardo sends his goons to murder Chandler and Kee and reclaim the dagger. In the deluge, Kee takes a crossbow meant for Chandler and dies in his arms. But Hong foretells Kee can still be resurrected from the dead by the golden child. Now, Chandler breaks into Sardo’s lair to save the child. Sardo transforms himself into a hideous, winged gargoyle and pursues Chandler and his charge back to Hong’s shop. Attempted to resuscitate Kee, Chandler is forced to confront Sardo for one final showdown. Without much effort, the child sees to it the dagger forced from Chandler’s hand is reclaimed and Chandler stabs Sardo through the heart, destroying him for good. Kee is brought back to life by the child and together with Chandler, the trio stroll down the hill towards a towering palm, even as Chandler discusses how they are going to return the golden child to his rightful home in the mountains.

Relying much too heavily on Eddie Murphy’s conversant tempi as the uber-savvy and streetwise guy who can get the job done, belies the fact, Murphy always considered himself a comedian who made movies, not an actor capable of assimilating into a part. Hence, Chandler Jarrell is really just a moniker vetted to Murphy’s built-in persona. Call him Fred, Josie, Mabel or Mark, Murphy’s just playing himself under a nom de plume. Regrettably, The Golden Child required something more of its star. But instead of rising to the occasion, he transgresses from hotshot comedy legend into ego-driven action hero with uncannily excruciatingly bad timing. And while box office is a solid barometer of overall popularity with an audience, just as frequently, it remains a very poor indicator of staying power or quality. I have yet to meet the person who, having seen The Golden Child, would consider it a great – even good – movie, if, indeed they remember it at all. One would think any flick to star Eddie Murphy, navigated by a sacred parakeet through some death-defying trials on a vision quest, employing black to defeat Satan's henchmen, and kicking some serious ass besides would have at least an ounce of merit to endure. Alas – no.  Murphy’s various bids to coast through the picture on his inimitable charm alone, with well-oiled ease to be sure, nevertheless, gets him stumped on a wisecrack that falls flat, even with all his nervy hunky-dory still intact.

The worst indiscretion of all is the plot – an omnibus of formulae from every Asian-themed adventure story peddles since time immemorial, capped off by a tacky CGI rendition of a real dragon lady – the bust of a human, tail of a lizard, and, 300-yrs.-old to boot. Under the working title, The Rose of Tibet, screenwriter, Feldman had aimed to create a Raymond Chandler-esque crime/thriller with supernatural elements. But in an interview for Fangoria Magazine, co-star, Charles Dance thusly summed up the picture’s fate under the rubric of studio shortsightedness. “Initially, The Golden Child was a very interesting script with lot of resonances, but Paramount basically chickened out. When they first screened it, it was a very different sort of film for Eddie Murphy. Paramount took too much notice of the preview audience's unease about the unfamiliarity of Eddie's character. So, the studio went back and reshot…Eddie doing Eddie Murphy-isms, and put them into the picture. Then they took out a really sumptuous, weird and beautiful score by John Williams, and replaced it with something funkier. So, basically, what you got was Beverly Hills Cop in Tibet."

I’ll not go into this one any further. It was 89-minutes of my life I can never get back, expanded by the time spent conjuring to life these reflections I would rather set aside and wholly forget, and likely will have no difficulty in doing, once the pall of The Golden Child’s witless frazzle has worn the tether to my short-term memory thin. The Golden Child is – bizarrely – a Paramount Presents…Blu-ray release. Aside: I thought this franchise from the mountain was supposed to celebrate the studio’s bona fide classics and movies to have withstood the test of time as cinema art. Apparently, I was mistaken, as The Golden Child is neither and still has been afforded a new 4K remaster and clean-up. It looks spectacular, with deep, fully saturated and extremely bright colors, excellent contrast, and point-on accurate film grain, with black levels that reveal an exceptional amount of fine detail. The DTS 5.1 audio is problematic. First off, it’s been remastered at an incredibly low decibel level. I had my receiver cranked to half its capacity and there were still moments where dialogue was inaudible. Worse, someone seems to have been toying at the controls, because the throughout inappropriate Colombier/Barry techno score explodes at intervals, forcing one to chronically toggle up and down the volume control so as not to pop an eardrum, either from too much bass, or straining to hear what’s going on during the more quiescent scenes. Extras include two short featurettes produced to promote the movie, plus a theatrical trailer. What? No Leonard Maltin intro? Shocking! Bottom line: The Golden Child is a movie you would rather forget than cherish. And to place it in the queue as a Paramount Presents...Blu-ray, ahead of movies like A Place in the Sun, The Day of the Locust, Dead Again, The Country Girl, The Matchmaker, The Rose Tattoo, Sorry, Wrong Number, Come Back Little Sheba, Hud, and the Oscar-winning, Ordinary People, all presently absent in adequate hi-def presentations, is just plain insulting. I suspect Eddie Murphy feels much the same way. Pass and be very glad that you did!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

0

VIDEO/AUDIO

5

EXTRAS

1