Remember Eddie Murphy? The edgy comedian and actor? He's nowhere to be found in the mediocre Daddy Day Care.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published May 8, 2003
[Photo: Columbia Pictures]
Phil (Jeff Garlin), left, Charlie (Eddie Murphy) and Marvin (Steve Zahn) learn that taking care of kids can be a dirty job in Daddy Day Care.
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I wonder what the Eddie Murphy of 1983 would say about the Murphy of 2003. Twenty years ago, Murphy was a maverick, an angry black man crowding comical, mostly white fuddy-duddies out of the way. He was the new Richard Pryor, scatological and certainly not suitable for children.
Murphy often poked fun at entertainers - Gumby and Mister Rogers - whose purity were at odds with children were growing up wiser. Murphy's salty talk in concerts and films were bad influences on lots of kids. Now the only way he enjoys hit movies is by sanitizing his act to become the kind of saccharine hand-puppet show he used to rip apart.
Daddy Day Care is the latest example, after the Dr. Dolittle flicks and voiceovers in Shrek and Mulan. Murphy's grown-up movies (I-Spy, Showtime, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, ad nauseam) practically ooze box office poison. But he has turned into a heck of a babysitter, especially on home video.
Daddy Day Care will be available soon there, so don't worry if you can't rush the kiddies to the megaplex.
Murphy plays an advertising executive (like we never see enough of them in movies) named Charlie Hinton, whose latest project, a breakfast cereal made from vegetables, flops and gets him fired. His colleague Hank (Jeff Garlin, a poor man's John Goodman) also gets the boot and they become stay-at-home dads. Charlie and Hank expand their household inexperience into a day care center, stealing business from a stuffy prep school operated by evil Ms. Harridan (Anjelica Huston) and drawing scrutiny from a deadpan social worker (Jonathan Katz).
Charlie's wife (Regina King) pops in to gape at the mess everybody's making or give a reassuring hug. Steve Zahn joins the day care staff with goofy exuberance and lessons from Spock (the Star Trek guy, not the doctor). Toss in a gaggle of bright, unruly moppets, each with their own developmental problems, and Daddy Day Care offers more than the usual number of actors to upstage Murphy, to whom the screenplay gives no chance to shine. Watching Daddy Day Care, it's obvious that any actor with an ounce of comic ability could play this role.
Nothing identifies this as a Murphy vehicle except his rubbery double takes when something goes wrong, like a thankfully unseen toilet catastrophe. The jokes are either bland, obvious or purely slapstick; Hank getting kicked several yards by a swing-set attack from the rear, faster camera speeds to signify a mass sugar buzz and a swarm of bees making grown-ups jump around like idiots.
That is the essence of Daddy Day Care's humor, making adults look dumber than the children they're raising. It works for viewers younger than age 10 or so, while the rest of us can just feel good that the small fry are temporarily satisfied, and hope they don't try these stunts at home. And we keep watching the lead actor, nagged by the fact that he vaguely reminds us of someone who used to be funny.
Daddy Day Care
Grade: C-
Director: Steve Carr
Cast: Eddie Murphy, Jeff Garlin, Regina King, Anjelica Huston, Khamani Griffin, Steve Zahn
Screenplay: Geoff Rodkey
Rating: PG; crude humor, mild language, stuff kids shouldn't try at home
