The Nutty Professor

**A comedic film that was successful, and which is based on the talented efforts of Eddie Murphy.**

This is one of the comedies that helped establish Eddie Murphy's name as a comic actor, and I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that it was one of the most memorable comedies that came out in the 90s: almost everyone has seen this film, regardless of whether or not they liked him. The story is quite simple and follows the journey of a clumsy university chemistry professor who, suffering from morbid obesity, decides to invent a serum that allows him, instantly, to assume the physical elegance he always dreamed of having... but when he falls in love with a slender woman, decides to test it on himself and discovers a disturbing side effect: a split personality that threatens to banish the real one and take on a life of its own.

I called him a double personality, but it would be more accurate to call him an “alter ego”, because Buddy Love – that's his name – is actually the reflection of all the repressed desires that Professor Sherman had and that he never fulfilled: a handsome, seductive, bold and flirtatious man, spontaneous and extroverted to the point of not having any kind of shame and having deeply unpleasant attitudes towards other people. Freudian? It's really something that only a psychoanalyst could understand, but which the film plays with in a deeply effective way.

But not everything is good in this film. The dialogues are quite weak, and the jokes were made with such a low and dirty style of humor that a person like me can hardly laugh. There are several moments in which this is observed more clearly, but all the scenes where the Klump family appears deserve negative attention. It's a part of the film that I, honestly, would have cut and deleted, and that I would never let a son or daughter see before we had a serious conversation about it.

Technically, the film is not a show in any way, except for all the makeup and costume work, developed around Eddie Murphy and the various characters he played in the film. It is a truly remarkable work, in which Murphy ages, rejuvenates, gains weight and loses weight as necessary, and always with a lot of verisimilitude and authenticity. And what about the work of the protagonist himself? I think it's enough to say that he deserves all the praise and accolades he received for the film. Despite the weaknesses and all the defects that I have pointed out, the commitment, dedication, professionalism and talent of an actor who, in a single film, plays eight or nine different characters is undeniable! If there's anything that makes this movie work, it's Eddie Murphy. Jada Pinkett Smith (still single at the time, as far as I know) did a decent job as a beauty who serves as Murphy's love interest, and does a reasonable job with her colleague, without being able to keep up with him for a single minute. James Coburn and Dave Chappelle make some positive notes, but that's all there is to it.

I reckon your enjoyment (or not) of this will depend on whether or not you like Eddie Murphy and his style of puerile comedy. As you might have guessed by now, I don't and so I found myself wondering why a now seventy-year-old Jerry Lewis - purveyor of the original outing for this troubled academic in 1963 - would have got himself involved in this at all. "Klump" is an obese scientist who discovers a solution for his portliness in the form of a serum. Snag? Well it does give him more of a sylph-like figure, but only for a finite period of time before he does his own version of the "Incredible Hulk" (or bulk). Moreover, it turns this avuncularly genial gent in to something all the more boorish. This doesn't auger well with his affections for student "Carla" (Jada Pinkett) who likes the look of his dapper and newly slimmed down alter-ego "Buddy", but is less enamoured of his noisy excesses. "Klump" knows that unless he can somehow rein in the "Jekyll" to his "Hyde" then his chances with his gal might be gone forever. Murphy plays just about everyone here and on that basis this film is a triumph for the make-up artistes who genuinely craft a plethora of characters that can disguise Murphy better than I had expected, but in the end it's all really just a chaotic vehicle for the star to push the boundaries of good/food taste to the limits of quickly-paced crassness. The one thing that did make me smile was the set-piece scene with stand up comic "Reggie" (Dave Chappelle) that ended up as a reverse roasting of one of those talentless comedians whose patter depends entirely on picking on a member of the audience to provide the butt of his jokes. This had earlier seen our tubby professor become a victim of his cruel jibes, so it was nice to see him getting his own comeuppance. Otherwise, though, this is a crude and classless remake that could have been so much better had Tom Shadyac kept better control of the annoyingly unfunny Murphy. It's not the worst remake I've seen, but it's up there...